


The Persistence Of Memory

by stormbourne



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-07
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:35:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 25,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27437458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stormbourne/pseuds/stormbourne
Summary: Five years ago, almost to the day, Glenn Fraldarius died. Felix, who all this time later still doesn't know the details of his death, begins to research the event in hopes that he can uncover the reasons why -- and any conspiracies that might have led to it. But, while researching, he accidentally comes in contact with another man who seems to be researching a similar incident for strangely similar reasons.Dimitri/Felix for the Dimilix Big Bang 2020!
Relationships: Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd/Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Rodrigue Achille Fraldarius, Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 3
Kudos: 30
Collections: Dimilix Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

“Sometimes I think you don’t even fucking care that he’s dead.” 

Rodrigue had barely even lowered the newspaper in his hands at Felix’s monologue about the truth or the world outside of their family, but now the papers flickered slightly. Felix could see his knuckles tightening on the paper, and a second later, his father sighed and folded up the news, putting it down on his desk. He looked tired, behind his reading glasses and five-o-clock shadow, but Felix _felt_ tired, so they were, as far as Felix was concerned, on equal ground. 

“Felix,” Rodrigue Fraldarius said, in a weary voice. “Do we have to do this every year?” The rest of his sentence was in French, even though there was no damn reason he couldn't speak English when they were at home. 

For some reason, however, Felix hadn’t expected that question, and he felt himself mentally stumble. To try and cover his surprise, he crossed his arms and let out a snort. 

“Glenn is not going to thank us for tearing one another apart,” Rodrigue continued, completely disregarding Felix’s response. “I’m exhausted, Felix. The anniversary of the death of my son is coming on me faster than I can prepare for, and even as it does, my other son nips at my heels as to whether or not I ever loved either of them.” 

Felix couldn’t contain or mask his flinch at that, and he saw his father’s expression soften slightly as he, too, witnessed the way he’d hit home. 

“You know that I would do anything to have Glenn back with us,” Rodrigue continued, his voice softening. “The same way I’d give anything to have your mother here. But there’s nothing to be done for it, Felix. The best we can do for him — for both of them — is to bury the hatchet and continue on with our lives.” 

Felix let his glance slide down to the newspaper, but there was nothing in there that would aid him. Nobody else observed the anniversary of a random man killed in a car accident. Nobody else even cared about it. 

The problem was that Felix _did._

There were too many questions about what had happened to Glenn, he’d told his father countless times. What if it had been some sort of hit job? He’d been in the car with other people, and any one of them could have been in trouble with — god only knew. The police, the mafia, local gangs? It could have been anything. Or maybe the other driver had been drunk, but had been able to pay to make it go away. Or, maybe … To be frank, there were too many options to count. 

And yet, Rodrigue would entertain none of them.

That by itself might not have been so concerning. But Rodrigue refused to talk about the accident at all with Felix. He refused to talk about what had happened to his only other son. Had Glenn died at the site? Had he made it to the hospital? The accident had happened when Felix had been away on a school trip, but even when he’d arrived home, Rodrigue wouldn’t speak of it. At first, he had decided that his father had just been deep in mourning, unwilling or unable to think about what had befallen his oldest child. Then, Felix had thought that maybe Rodrigue was trying to spare him of some grisly details.

But the years had marched on, and Felix still didn’t know anything more about Glenn’s death than he had at Glenn’s funeral. Seven years, and he still didn’t know even what Glenn had been out driving _for._

“It would be easier to bury the hatchet,” he said, frowning and narrowing his eyes, “if we could _talk_ about the hatchet.”

Rodrigue’s shoulders went slack. He sighed, shook his head, and looked at Felix with a pained expression.

“Don’t bother,” Felix interrupted before his father could offer his usual excuses — that it was too painful, that they would speak about it later, or just that he was exhausted. “I don’t want to hear what you have to say for yourself. But one day, I’ll find out what really happened there. Mark my words.” 

Rodrigue just shook his head again. He studied Felix’s face, sighed, and picked his newspaper back up. Felix took the cue from his father, turned, and left the study. 

-

“Well, frankly, Felix, I think your father deserves a bit more sympathy,” Ingrid said, shaking her head as she picked at her croissant. “Poor Rodrigue. You know, it might have been your brother that died, but it was his _son._ ”

“And Ingrid’s first crush,” Sylvain hastened to point out. Ingrid didn’t hesitate to deck him in the shoulder. He whined, rubbing his hand against his wound. 

“It’s like he pulled the two of you aside before I got here,” Felix replied, taking a sip of his coffee. “You give him too much wiggle room. You know, I don’t even know what killed him. Blunt force trauma? Blood loss?” 

“Felix, that’s so gauche.” Ingrid glanced around the room. Nobody seemed to be paying attention to them, and the cafe was empty enough to begin with. “Do we have to talk about this here?” 

He wasn’t sure when else they were supposed to talk about it. Was he supposed to bring this up at some time besides their coffee meetups? The three of them were too busy to meet up much outside of them. Ingrid was working on a law degree, and Sylvain had classes for whatever major he’d switched to this year to look after. Felix wasn’t entirely certain of why Sylvain bothered taking classes at all when his commitment to his degree was lacking. But he was almost certain that it was to avoid Miklan. 

Outside of the coffee shop, snow swirled in fat, heavy flakes. If Toronto had a tourist season, this was it — skiing, snowboarding, snowbirding, the works. Several shops had cheery Christmas lights hung above their doorways, and the aggressive red and white of peppermint flavoring had infected everything, including banners hanging from the streetlights. Even within the cafe, a carefully-cultivated holiday playlist swanned out from the speakers overhead, at a constant low volume. It was all a little too unbearably festive, especially the knowledge that when Felix went home today, his father would probably be risking his back and hanging lights of his own. 

A few people — teenagers clad in pom-pommed hats and heavy coats — pushed open the cafe door, bubbly conversation rushing in alongside them. Felix thought of himself at their age, inwardly winced, and then allowed Ingrid her point.

“We don’t have to talk about that,” he allowed. The teenagers all set about loudly placing their orders before congregating around one table on the other side of the store. When Felix was fourteen, he’d loved to come to this cafe with Sylvain and Ingrid and spend the day at the largest table, playing card games and laughing. 

When Felix was fourteen, Glenn had still been alive.

He sighed, lowering his voice, and met Ingrid’s eyes. There was a strange moment where she almost seemed to flinch away. He brushed it off — maybe she could just see that this was eating away at him from the inside. He ducked his head, a little embarrassed by the idea. 

“Can you at least understand where I’m coming from, here?” he asked, lacing his fingers together. “If one of your brothers died, and you didn’t know what had happened to him, or why, or who had done it — ”

“This isn’t a question I can answer for you, Felix,” she said, in a voice so soft it was almost a whisper. She broke eye contact now, deliberately, turning her entire face away as she bit her lip. “I don’t know what I _would_ do. Maybe I’d be — like your father. Too grief-stricken to think about it beyond my own heartsickness. Can you blame him if he doesn’t want to reopen an old wound?” 

Sylvain didn’t seem to want to interfere in the conversation at all, so he jumped a few inches when Felix turned directly to him, folding his arms and waiting.

“What?” his friend asked after loudly swallowing a mouthful of coffee.

“Go on, then,” Felix said. “What’s the excuse you have for it? For not thinking I have a point?”

“Felix,” Ingrid said, and her previous sympathy had turned entirely into exasperation. 

“No, I want to hear it,” Felix said. “I want to hear what excuses you came up with, or my father fed to you, or whatever the hell it is.”

“Oh,” Sylvain said, like he’d been asked to do simple math, and he shrugged. “I just figured there was no point in arguing with you. Once you’ve made your mind up, you tend to ignore literally anything anybody else says.” He took a sip of his drink, then shrugged again. “Even if they’re right.” He thought about it for a second, then pointed at Felix as though he’d just figured something out. “ _Especially_ if you know they’re actually right,” he finished.

“Thanks for being such a good friend who values me as an individual, Sylvain,” Felix said in flat deadpan. 

“Look, am I wrong?” Sylvain reached over to pinch off the end of Ingrid’s croissant, tossing it into his mouth despite her protests. “I could give you the best reason in the world to let all of this drop,” Sylvain continued, leaning forward on one arm.

Ingrid made an alarmed noise. “Sylvain!” 

He just waved a hand at her. 

“Why?” Felix asked, turning toward her. She looked pale, teeth gritted. “What’s he saying, exactly?” When all Ingrid did was shake her head, Felix turned back to Sylvain. “What am I missing here?”

“Nothing,” Sylvain said. “Ingrid’s getting stressed out because she thinks I can’t handle this alone. Anyway, what I’m saying is, even if I _gave_ you the best reason to let this all drop — you wouldn’t, would you? I could tell you, Felix, if you go investigate this shit you one hundred percent _will_ get hit by lightning, and you’d be like ‘well, the lightning will have to fucking deal with it,’ and go anyway.” 

There was no question in that statement, but Felix had to seriously consider if he deserved for there to be one.

“You’re right,” he said, begrudgingly. Beside him, Ingrid let out a breath. 

“So, anyway, why bother?” Sylvain shrugged again. “Even if I give you the world’s best reason not to go, you’ll do it anyway. You’re not really doing this to get any answers, and you know it. You’re doing it to prove a point.” 

“I’m doing it for answers,” Felix countered. 

“Alright, then you’re doing it for answers _and_ to prove a point. And fuck, Felix, we all know how you get when you have something to prove. So knock yourself out, I guess, but try not to do anything crazy.” Sylvain’s stance collapsed all at once, his shoulders slumping and his arms falling to the table. “There, we got all that out? We done?” 

“Yes,” Felix said. “I suppose so.” 

“I wish you wouldn’t encourage him,” Ingrid said to Sylvain, who shrugged yet again. 

“I just want to go back to talking about normal things and stop trying to rip each other’s throats out,” Sylvain said. “Is that not cool?” 

“It’s fine,” Felix said before Ingrid could interrupt. “You’re right, regardless. How are classes?” 

“Finals in a week,” Sylvain replied with a groan. “Bet you don’t miss that. How’s it going, mister gap year?” 

“It’s not a gap year, for the sixtieth time.” Felix sighed. “I’m just … evaluating what I want to do with myself.” 

They’d had this conversation several times. Felix wasn’t even sure, at this point, that college had ever been right for him in the first place. But he couldn’t just not get a degree. There was nothing he could imagine having as his major that wouldn’t end up boring him. At this point, when he went back to school again, he’d just throw himself into a business degree to have it done with and out of the way. But it wasn’t Sylvain’s place to ask, when he seemed to switch majors at least once a month. 

“Well,” Ingrid said, a little too forcefully. Felix hated, sometimes, how she felt like she had to be the mediator of their conversations. “You have plenty of time to think about it, Felix. I’m sure you’ll come out of this with more direction.”

“Thanks, mother,” he said. She rolled her eyes. 

From there, the conversation turned progressively more menial. Felix only half paid attention as Ingrid told stories of what her older brothers had brought home with them for their visit. Sylvain didn’t tell any stories about his family, but none of them expected that at this point. Instead, he shared stories about his classes, or, to Ingrid’s chagrin, his dates with some of the girls from them. 

“Why do you even bother going on dates with these women, when you treat them like garbage and inevitably never see them again?” Ingrid demanded, halfway into this week’s story. 

“Come on, Ingrid, am I not supposed to have a romantic life?” 

“You could, perhaps, make half an attempt to grow up a bit before you do,” she grumbled. 

Their eyes turned onto Felix, but the only thing he had to share, he already had. And even then, he’d spared them several details about his fight with his father. 

Specifically, he hadn’t told them that he’d accused Rodrigue of not caring that Glenn was dead. They already thought poorly enough of him right now, and he’d left out the worst thing he’d said. That certainly made him consider what, exactly, he was doing. But in the end, Sylvain was right, and once he’d made up his mind, he wouldn’t be swayed. Even by his own reluctance to confront his anger at his father. 

“I think I should probably go,” Felix said, as a result. 

“What?” Sylvain asked.

Felix was the one to shrug this time, turning to start putting his bag away. He avoided meeting his friends’ eyes. “If I’m going to start poking into Glenn’s death,” he said, “I’d better figure out everything I need to do. What I need to find out. Where I need to go. Who I need to ask.” 

“I really cannot believe you’re still going to do this,” Ingrid said. Sylvain just leaned back, letting out a breath, shaking his head and closing his eyes. 

“You heard Sylvain,” Felix said. He climbed to his feet, slinging his bag over one shoulder. “Once I make my mind up, good luck changing it. And I have made my mind up. I’m going to find out what happened to Glenn. What _really_ happened.” 

“There’s nothing there to find,” Sylvain said, but he kept his eyes closed and didn’t make any effort to talk Felix down beyond that.

“And maybe then I’ll find nothing,” Felix said. “But at least I’ll have the _answers.”_

Sylvain shook his head one more time, opening his eyes and giving Felix a slight grimace. “You might regret looking.”

“I thought there was nothing there to find,” Felix countered. Sylvain didn’t respond, either to confirm or deny that. Felix narrowed his eyes, considering what Sylvain was attempting to communicate to him, or what dreadful secret he might be hiding. 

“Do you know something?” he demanded.

Sylvain didn’t answer.

“Do _you_ know something?” Felix asked Ingrid instead.

“Felix, stop being crazy,” Ingrid replied, raising her hands. “Come on, sit down. We can talk about this.” 

“You _do,_ ” Felix said, incrredulous, and then at once saw what must have happened. “My father talked to you, didn’t he? He told you about our argument before I even ever got here. And he told you what he thought I was going to say. And he begged you not to tell me _anything.”_

“That’s not it, but I don’t think you’re going to listen to anything I say, at this point,” Sylvain said. His voice was weighed down with sheer exasperation. “Believe whatever crazy thing you have to make up to get this to fit your weird narrative, okay? We’re trying to look out for you, and we’re not conspiring with your father, or some shit.”

“I’m going to find out what happened,” Felix said, leaning forward into Sylvain’s face. He didn’t even flinch, just let out another hefty sigh.

“I’m not your enemy, Felix,” Sylvain said. He sounded the way Rodrigue had the night of their argument, worn at the edges and tired through the core of his soul. “But if you’ve got to have a bad guy, sure. What the hell, why not. Have fun.” 

Felix reined himself back in, standing and looking over his friends. Maybe Rodrigue hadn’t spoken to them, but it was clear beyond words that both of them knew something about the accident and were simply electing not to tell him. So, whether they were deliberately helping Rodrigue hide the truth or not didn’t matter. Ultimately, they were doing the same thing.

“I’m going to find out what happened,” he repeated. 

“Do whatever you want,” Sylvain replied. Felix turned on his heel and walked away from his friends. On the way to the entrance, he passed that table full of teenagers, who had all gone quiet. A few of them watched him with wide, terrified eyes. He grimaced as he looked away, pushing the door of the shop open and not allowing himself to glance back. 

-

Felix didn’t make a habit of going to the city library. It was always crowded, for one thing. And regardless of how quiet it was meant to be, noise always accompanied crowds that big. The university had a library with everything he needed for his courses, so he spent his study sessions there. But he wasn’t about to turn up to the university library, the man who’d taken a sudden unplanned gap year to re-evaluate his degree. It might have been a large university, but the very concept of seeing someone he knew, or a professor he’d admired, killed the urge to go there.

So, instead, he went to the city library, navigating through the floors until he came to the newspaper archives. Drawers full of microfiche, books full of flaking and faded newsprint. He dug through them until he found the month and year he needed, then pulled the book up and opened it on the table. 

He found the article soon enough. _THREE KILLED IN CAR CRASH ON HIGHWAY 401,_ the headline read. The article itself was short, noting that five people had been in the car, but that police had not yet released names of the victims. That, alone, felt off to Felix. Why hadn’t their names been released immediately? He leafed through a few more papers until, there, on page 2 of the paper from a few days later, he found his brother’s face gazing back at him in the obituaries. 

_GLENN VICTOR FRALDARIUS_ stood out in bold text over several paragraphs describing Glenn’s life, his interests, his recognition with a full-ride scholarship. Felix’s heart gave a pang as he briefly revisited memories of his brother, and considered what Glenn, the genius and scholar, might have to say about his little brother dropping out of school on a whim. He pushed the thought out of his mind and tried to concentrate on the article before him. 

There was, unfortunately, not much more than Felix himself knew. The date of the accident, the name of the hospital that Glenn had been taken to — well, that did at least answer whether Glenn had even made it to an ambulance — and that he had died of injuries received in the accident. 

A dead end.

Felix frowned, narrowed his eyes, and flipped back to the first newspaper in the month. He set about scouring the police logs of each and every day, looking for signs of anything suspect. Stolen cars. Domestic disturbances. Anything too serious wouldn’t be reported, but he had to start somewhere. Someone was hiding something about the accident. It wouldn’t be easy to just uncover all of it. It became apparent that the newspaper he needed most was missing from the book. He’d have to ask the librarian later.

Behind him, something thudded loudly. He glanced back toward the shelves, only to see that one of the archive books had fallen over, off of the shelf. He frowned. He’d been certain that he’d put the books back where they belonged. Perhaps he’d accidentally nudged them in his hurry to check out this one. 

He started toward the shelf, only to see a pair of large hands pick up the book. A similarly large man knelt as he picked the book up, then rose to return it to its spot. Felix couldn’t see much of the man from this angle, but he watched as the shape turned briefly toward him, and then away. He could hear footsteps retreating. 

He was far from the only one likely to need something from the newspaper archive, he told himself as he sat back down at the table he’d claimed. People came in and out every day, doing research projects of their own. 

He forgot about it the rest of the day. And the rest of the next, and the day after that. 

Then, the next time he went to the library, he found that the archive book he needed, the one from the month Glenn had died, was missing from the shelf. He puzzled over the shelf for several long minutes before he finally decided that it must have been picked up by someone else in the library. He climbed back to his feet, pondering what direction to take next, and where he could start researching without that book. 

“Excuse me.” 

When he turned, a tall, broad giant of a man stood before him, wild blond hair tumbling to his shoulders. 

There was a brief instant where a million separate shards of something Felix didn’t recognize scattered across his mind. Dreams he’d forgotten, people he’d met when he was too young to remember human faces. Other worlds, other souls, perhaps, brushing against his own.

And then that moment was gone, and he was blinking up at the man before him. He only had one eye, Felix noted. The other was covered with a thick, plain black patch. 

“Are you looking for this?” the man asked, his voice a low baritone. There was something slightly rough about it. Before Felix could ask what he meant, the man proffered a thick, tall book — the archive volume Felix had been looking for.

“Yeah,” he said, and, before the man could yank it away, took it himself. 

“Sorry about that,” the man said. Felix stepped back from the man, studying his eyepatch and ragged hair and wondering what, exactly, about this man was setting off every alarm his intuition had. The more he looked at the man, the more familiar the lines of his face seemed, like a character from a dream or a person from a previous life. Even the shade of blue of his single eye hit something primal and instinctive within Felix. 

But Felix was almost certain that they had never met. 

“Yeah,” Felix repeated. “Well, thanks.” 

The man stood there a moment longer, peering at Felix, and then, finally, slowly turned away. He took his time retreating, Felix noted, holding his ground until the man turned a corner and vanished. Even then, he just walked to the end of the shelf, counted to one hundred, and finally emerged.

The man was gone. 

Felix swallowed hard, set down the book, and tried to go back to his research.

-

Felix determined quickly enough that though the blond man wasn’t at the library every time Felix was, he was there often enough that it couldn’t be coincidence.

Sometimes they would brush by one another in the archive shelves. Sometimes Felix would go to the card catalogue and find it open to the exact spot he needed. Yet sometimes, the archive he needed would be missing. The information about car recalls he wanted to cross-reference would have been already checked out. The documents about local community officials — one of the people in the car with Glenn had been a well-known labor organizer, and there was always a chance it had been a hit job — would be gone. 

It was impossible to say what the man’s game was. 

There wasn’t enough there for the man to have been helping him. Occasionally, their paths crossed, but it was often not in any way that benefitted either one of them. Felix saw him haunting the shelves like a wraith, that single blue eye always somehow finding Felix and following him through the shelves. 

Was he being watched? What reason would there be to keep such a close eye on someone who was just trying to find out the truth about his brother’s death? Maybe he was from one of Sylvain’s courses, and the absolute idiot had hired him to keep an eye on Felix. If that was the case — and it was the likeliest explanation Felix had so far — then Felix almost resented him for picking someone who was so bad at subterfuge. Some informant he was going to be, while Felix knew he was there the entire time.

The more Felix saw his new stalker, however, the more he was convinced there was something about the man that he recognized. But the more he searched his memory, the more certain he was that they’d never met. Certainly, he’d have remembered someone with an eyepatch if they’d been even more than a passing encounter. There was the chance that he had been one of the many faces Felix had never fully learned from his time at university. Or that he’d been a customer somewhere Felix had also been recently. But none of those would explain the strange gnawing familiarity that filled his mind every time he saw the man.

After a particularly unproductive day where the archive was gone and Felix saw his strange stalker no less than three times, he finally forced himself to take a break from the library. The anniversary of Glenn’s death was only days away, now, and he needed to at least be present and civil for it. He wasn’t ready to apologize to Rodrigue yet, if only because he couldn’t confront some of the things he’d said. But he could be around when friends of the family visited, when Ingrid and Sylvain’s parents shared their sympathies, when Gustave Dominic offered to say a prayer with Rodrigue. 

“Apparently Sylvain says you didn’t show up for coffee this week,” Rodrigue said in French one day, over the pizza they’d ordered for dinner. 

“Sylvain told his parents something about his life?” Felix asked, replying in English. “That’s a surprise.”

“Felix,” Rodrigue scolded. 

“No,” Felix replied, a moment later, not sure what else Rodrigue expected him to say. “I didn’t go. We had a fight last week. I’m still angry about it.” 

“Well, that’s shocking! You two never argue.” Felix’s distaste for the sarcasm must have shown on his face, because Rodrigue backpedaled almost immediately. “What was the fight about?”

What was he supposed to tell Rodrigue, exactly? _The fight was about our argument. The fight was about what happened to Glenn. The fight was because I’m a paranoid imbecile who sees conspiracies everywhere. The fight was about the fact that even if that’s true, it’s also true that no one here tells me a damn thing. All of the above._

“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said. 

“Sylvain can be a bit bullheaded, but he means well,” Rodrigue said. Felix all but tuned him out as he tucked into his food. Rodrigue probably thought this was about Sylvain’s philandering or something of the like. “You just need to be patient. Sometimes he pretends not to care about anything, but — ”

“Sylvain’s one of my closest friends,” Felix snapped, glancing up. “I don’t need your advice on handling him.” 

Something strange and incomprehensible passed over his father’s face. Rodrigue took a step back, his face falling, and then smoothing itself out again a few moments later. 

“Of course you don’t,” Rodrigue said, but now he was speaking in English. 

“What was that?” Felix demanded, and before Rodrigue could deny he knew what Felix was talking about, “Don’t act like you’re doing me a favor, here, I speak French, too. And don’t bother playing at being confused, either. That look on your face just now. What was that about? What are you and Sylvain _hiding_ from me?” 

Rodrigue took a deep breath through his nose, and then shook his head. “Not now,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t — not right now.” 

“That’s always what you say,” Felix replied. He retreated to his room, and, the next day, went back to the library again. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be sure to check out [the art by buaylomatcha](https://twitter.com/bualoymatcha/status/1325171097650696194) and [the art by chusyds!](https://twitter.com/chusyds/status/1325168134886658048)


	2. Chapter 2

The blond man was not only there, but seated at one of the tables in the central area of the floor. He had a newspaper archive volume spread out before him, and Felix could see him studying what looked like an obituary page. He didn’t even want to know if Glenn’s was among them.

“You,” he said, as he walked up and dropped his bag atop the newspapers. The man jumped in his seat and sharply looked up at Felix. Today, he had his wild hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wore a thick blue winter coat over a tattered-looking button-up. The line of his eyepatch ran across his forehead. His remaining eye was dazzlingly blue. Felix fought off the returning wave of familiarity. 

“Can I help you?” the stranger asked. If he was only pretending to be befuddled, he was a good actor. Felix tried not to think too much about what this man could be.

“If you’re here to stop me from investigating, you’re barking up the wrong tree,” Felix said. “I don’t know if Sylvain or Ingrid or my father put you up to it. And frankly, I don’t care. I’m not going to stop until I find out what happened. So you might as well quit while you’re ahead.”

The man blinked at him, and Felix swallowed his embarrassment. He was tired of this man haunting his thoughts, and there was only one way to stop it. And this was it.

“And on the other hand,” Felix continued, “if you’re trying to help me, would you just fucking say so? I’m not good at this spy novel underhanded bullshit. It’s the most I can do to read some goddamn newspapers. If you’re trying to give me some breadcrumbs, quit it and just tell me so.” 

The man blinked again.

“And if it’s neither of those, then just tell me what the hell you want with me,” Felix concluded. “Or at _least_ tell me where I know you from.” 

“Well,” the man said, “I’m not sure I have an answer to either of those questions, really.” He got to his feet. He was several inches taller than Felix, which Felix had come to accept most people were. He was broad-shouldered and in the way his shirt fell as he stood up, Felix could see lines of muscle. He held out one of his hands, which Felix frowned down at. “I’m Dimitri Blaiddyd,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” 

After another moment of evaluation, Felix took the man’s hand. He wasn’t sure what he expected — another spark of recognition? A similar moment of terrifying, soul-deep vertigo to the first time he’d seen the man? But no. It was just a handshake. 

“Felix Fraldarius,” he offered. 

“Fraldarius,” Dimitri murmured, lips pursing. Then his eye brightened, and he leaned forward. “That’s right, Fraldarius! That was it! Your father is named Rodrigue, isn’t he? My father and yours used to work together.” 

Felix certainly didn’t remember Rodrigue mentioning anybody with the surname Blaiddyd — it was distinctive enough that it would have stuck out in his memory. But then again, Rodrigue had always been a stickler with keeping his personal and business lives separate. Maybe he simply hadn’t mentioned it to his family. But then again, maybe Felix had seen Dimitri’s father before, from Rodrigue’s various work parties. It seemed like a leap of logic, but maybe Dimitri just bore an overwhelming resemblance to his father. 

“I suppose that explains it, then,” Felix said, and lifted his chin. “So what are _you_ doing here checking into those records?” 

“Well, it’s embarrassing to speak of, and a long story on top of that,” Dimitri said. He released Felix, rubbing the back of his neck with his other hand. The motion suddenly condensed him from a threatening, broad-shouldered, well-muscled brawler into a normal human being — one that couldn’t have been much older than Felix, now that Felix studied him more intently. A human being who took courses, judging from the size of the backpack beside him. Just a completely ordinary person, not a thread and certainly not working for Sylvain. “There’s an incident from several years ago that I’m researching,” Dimitri said at last. “Family matters. You know how it is.” 

“Better than you think,” Felix muttered. 

“Regardless, I suppose we must have been using some of the same resources,” Dimitri said. When he smiled, his entire face brightened, creasing the corners of his visible eye and dimpling his cheeks. Felix quashed a flush that threatened to rise up his cheeks. “I truly didn’t mean to upset or frighten you. I can only imagine how I would have reacted!” 

Felix didn’t bother to point out that the same thing _had_ been happening to Dimitri, and he’d managed not to jump to conclusions. Then again, maybe he didn’t have nosy, overly-concerned friends. “Well,” he said. “Nice to meet you. I imagine we’ll still see a bit of each other around. Sorry I scared you.” 

“Oh, no, Felix, wait.” 

Felix waited, despite himself, turning back on his heel. Dimitri turned and motioned to the book on the table beside them, then turned back to Felix.

“The least I can do for giving you such a scare is help you out,” he said. “Honestly, I expect that I’ll probably find some the information I need, along the way helping you. And I have to make this up to you somehow.”

“You don’t have to make anything up to me,” Felix murmured. He found it difficult to look directly at Dimitri. There was too much earnestness in that gaze. Too much warmth. Felix was pretty sure that he’d never had that level of warmth directed at him, though that very thought sat strangely in his mind. Like there was something out of alignment about it. “I appreciate the gesture.”

“I insist,” Dimitri said. He reached out and tugged the book closed. “Or,” he said, “if you would rather continue your search alone, at _least_ let me treat you to coffee. Please.”

Felix let out a snort, raising his eyebrows as he turned more fully toward Dimitri. There was absolutely nothing mocking or teasing in the man’s expression, even if that was an offer Sylvain would have made a girl he intended to take home. 

“Spare me,” he said. “If it’s got to be one or the other, fine, you can help me look up what happened to — what happened.” Dimitri didn’t need to know about Glenn, or about details. They were intensely and horribly personal, and it was none of his business. “You don’t have to lay it on so thick.”

Dimitri looked befuddled at that. “Lay what on?” he asked with all the politesse of royalty. 

“You know exactly what I mean,” Felix said. 

Dimitri shrugged, still looking more confused than understanding. He turned back toward the table, indicated the archive book again, and then looked back at Felix once more. There was clear _hope_ in his eye. Felix felt like he’d be kicking a puppy if he said no. With a sigh, he let his bag fall from his shoulder, taking a seat at the table opposite from the blond man. He didn’t even need to look at Dimitri to know that he was smiling wide as anything. He still did chance a glance upward, though, and his heart skipped a little at the way the man seemed to smile with his entire face. His dimpled cheeks, his crinkled eyes, the wide pink curve of his lower lip.

Felix pulled himself away from those thoughts. The thoughts themselves felt like they belonged to someone else, a different being inhabiting his own skin. 

“December 26,” he said as Dimitri opened the archive back up. Dimitri looked up at him, his visible eyebrow climbing. Felix could see the other one, hidden behind his bangs, rising over his eyepatch. “What?” he demanded.

“Only that it’s the same day I was looking at, when you walked in,” Dimitri said. He turned the book around, climbed to his feet, and, in the most infuriating show of earnestness Felix had ever witnessed in his entire life, walked around to lean over the table beside Felix. Felix took hold of the book and pulled it close, examining the same article he’d been looking at a few days ago. Not the original article about the crash, but a later one announcing that the police had closed their investigation. 

The paper didn’t name survivors of the crash. They had some level of journalistic respect. Still, it wasn’t difficult to figure out what happened. Especially considering that, when Felix turned to the obituaries page, Glenn’s face gazed up at him. 

Dimitri made a noise. 

“You don’t have to help,” Felix said, not looking up from the obituary. He’d refused to read it when he was younger. Surely anything Rodrigue had to say about Glenn was something that Felix wouldn’t be interested in hearing. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something there to find, buried in the information about his brother’s life.

“No, it’s not that,” Dimitri said. When Felix glanced up at last, Dimitri was staring down at the obituaries, perplexed. “Sometimes …” Dimitri continued. His voice was halting and hesitant, like he was sharing a massive secret. “Sometimes I simply … recognize people, but I can’t place where I’ve seen them. Or why I recognize them. It’s a bit of a — medical condition, I’m afraid, but I …” 

The obituaries page was hardly empty. There were six other obituaries, almost all of them with pictures. Dimitri’s mouth was tight and pulled back on one side. Felix glanced down at Glenn’s face, at the paragraphs full of information, at what he’d been intending to spend much of the day attempting to decipher. Then he glanced up at Dimitri’s perplexed — and frankly distressed — face. 

He sighed, flipped the page, and continued perusing the police log. Over him, Dimitri let out a sigh of relief. 

-

By the time they were done, Felix had gotten next to no work done. There had been very little on the trail for him to follow. He’d been so counting on poring over Glenn’s obituary, or the article about the investigation being called off. But despite himself, he’d moved on for Dimitri’s comfort.

In fact, Felix had the distinct impression that they’d spent more of the day working on Dimitri’s mystery than on his own. They had pored over several days worth of police logs, front pages, obituary sections, and more. Occasionally, Dimitri had hummed or huffed in thought, but Felix was courteous enough not to nose in about what he was looking for. He considered, briefly, whether he would have wanted the other man to ask about what Felix was investigating, himself.

He was surprised to find the answer was yes.

It had been so long that he’d had anybody to speak to about Glenn’s death that didn’t stonewall him, or brush him off. Sylvain and Ingrid had both tolerated his frustration since the accident had happened, but it was clear that they had, at some point, gotten tired of it. They still allowed him to complain, but Felix could see whenever he did that they weren’t really listening anymore. Rodrigue hadn’t listened to him about Glenn since Glenn had died. He’d only given his excuses about his grief, or being too busy to speak about Glenn now. Not once had he made good on his promises to speak to Felix later about his brother. 

But Dimitri, like Felix, never asked any questions about what Felix was searching for. He asked plenty for Felix to turn the page, or if Felix was ready to check out something else, and Felix, ashamed of causing Dimitri so much grief, always just answered “yes.” Dimitri might have offered to help him, but really, he was the one who deserved some recompense for everything that had happened. 

Dimitri was as bright as the fucking sun when he cheerfully asked Felix when they’d next see each other, as Felix pulled his bag over his shoulder. Felix wasn’t sure how to answer that, or if he even should. He mostly just wanted to put this behind him, forget all about the time that he’d demanded a random stranger tell Felix the story of his life. As far as he was concerned, it was better if they never saw each other again. 

“I don’t know,” he muttered, finally, averting his eyes so he wouldn’t have to look at Dimitri’s wide, hopeful smile or the bright puppy-dog light in his eyes. 

“Well,” Dimitri said, pushing the archive book they’d been using last aside and pulling his own bag onto the table. “Regardless, I’m certain that we’ll see one another again. I’ll be looking forward to it, Felix.” 

It was frustrating, how obviously he meant every word of that. Felix tucked his head down into the folds of his jacket, gave a quick nod, and then turned and wove out of the library. He didn’t look back to see if Dimitri was following — even if he was, who cared? There were only so many doors out of the library. All Dimitri following him would have meant was that he’d used the same parking lot.

Still, he swore he could feel Dimitri’s shadow following him all the way back out the door. 

Once he was outside, he lifted his head to take a breath of the cold air. It was past sunset, now, this time of year. Pale, blue-tinted spotlights lit the pathway back to the parking lot. The snow on the ground made everything look more haunting, more barren and empty. A few sparse, deep purple clouds littered the sky to the west, slowly fading into evening blue. To the east, the clouds became longer and darker, portents of coming snow. 

“Felix!” 

Felix lifted his head to see his father hurrying down the walk from the parking lot. He narrowed his eyes as Rodrigue gave him a wide smile over his thick winter scarf. 

“Sylvain said I might find you here,” he said. “Still doing your research?”

“Why?” Felix asked. There was no need to be combative about it, but he found it was his natural instinct. His father likely hadn’t come here just to make small talk. And if he’d been speaking with Sylvain … well, it had been quite obvious what Sylvain’s opinion of the entire affair was. “Going to try and talk me out of it?” 

Rodrigue’s face fell. He took in a deep breath, and Felix watched him release it in a puff of steam. 

“There’s no need to be like this,” his father said, with a voice that was forced even. “Felix, you know my opinion of what you’re doing. I don’t see any need to try and dissuade you. Sylvain _asked_ me to —”

“Oh,” Felix interrupted, “and you do whatever Sylvain wants, now, is that what it is?” 

“Let me _finish,_ ” Rodrigue continued. When Felix didn’t interrupt him again, he kept speaking. “I didn’t come here to stop you, Felix. I was coming here regardless. But I spoke to Sylvain because I wanted to make sure you weren’t expecting me tonight, and he told me we’d probably cross paths. You can research all you like on what happened to your brother.” As Felix watched, Rodrigue’s expression faded into something tense and weary, the lines around his eyes deepening slightly. “I don’t know if you could even hope to find anything,” he said.

“You know exactly what happened,” Felix said, unwilling to let the fight go. “You know exactly what happened when he died, and you won’t tell me. You won’t tell _anyone._ Except, I guess, fucking Sylvain and Ingrid?”

“Felix,” Rodrigue said patiently. 

“Don’t ‘Felix’ me,” Felix replied. “What the hell is it about Glenn that you can’t tell me? Did someone have it out for him? Was he a casualty in an attack on someone else? What the fuck happened? I don’t even know how he _died._ But Sylvain and Ingrid, oh, they get to know the truth. Sylvain gets to be an annoying little shit about how I shouldn’t bother looking because there’s nothing to find. Ingrid gets to act like she knows best about what I should or shouldn’t do, because her knowing how Glenn died is more important than _me_ knowing.” 

The more Felix spoke, the more exhausted Rodrigue looked. Once he had run out of gas, Rodrigue took another long, deep breath and let it out again. He lowered his head, tucked his scarf closer to his chin, and then glanced up at Felix with clear pain on his face. 

“I can’t talk about this right now,” Rodrigue said. “I didn’t come here to stop you, Felix. I don’t know if your research will help you, but I pray that it does.” He shook his head, and looked back down. “I’ll see you later tonight,” he said, and brushed past Felix. 

Felix stood, looking after his father, for several minutes. He barely even felt the cold on his face anymore. It helped that there was barely any wind, but he suspected that even if there had been, he might still not feel it. 

How many times had he fought with his father over the past two weeks? More than he ever had in the last five years. Maybe standing over Glenn’s grave for the fifth year in a row, still without any answers, had just driven something within Felix to madness. Five years of the same faces, Ingrid and Sylvain’s parents, Gustave Dominic making offers of prayer and spiritual guidance. Five years of Rodrigue not meeting his eyes, begging forgiveness, leaving rooms when Felix spoke about Glenn, always apologizing. 

For a moment, there in the winter cold, the sky faded now to deep, dark blue — for a moment, Felix remembered Ingrid’s words. Glenn had been his brother, but he had been Rodrigue’s son. Rodrigue’s firstborn. Was it truly possible that Rodrigue was so wracked with grief that he found it too hard to speak of his first child? 

_I don’t know if your research will help you, but I pray that it does,_ Rodrigue had said. Not the words of a man with something to hide. More words of a man with some terrible knowledge that he found too difficult to share.

“Felix,” another voice said. This one sounded surprised. 

When Felix looked up, Dimitri stood not far away, his thick blue coat buttoned and zipped all the way up. His thick, furry hood wreathed his face. It made him look almost comical, but Felix found that he wasn’t in the mood to laugh. The fur did, still, highlight the round apples of Dimitri’s cheeks, the spots where his smile dimpled, the long lashes over his visible eye. He looked almost young. It was almost familiar, in a way, like how his friends had looked when they were younger. He was fairly sure he remembered Sylvain with those same chubby cheeks, even if his face had since narrowed out. 

“Dimitri,” he replied. 

“I didn’t think you would still be here,” Dimitri said. His cheeks dimpled again as he smiled. Felix swallowed his heart before it could do another backflip. “What a pleasant surprise it is to see you again so soon!” 

The level of earnestness Dimitri projected was almost overwhelming. Felix found himself shrugging back down into his coat. His ears burned, which only served to remind him of how cold it actually was. He tugged his own hood up. 

“Ran into my father,” he said. “He was on the way in. We had a talk.” Dimitri’s brow furrowed, and he glanced back over his shoulder. It was likely, Felix realized, that he’d passed Rodrigue on the way out. But he couldn’t expect Dimitri to recognize his father. Regardless, when Dimitri turned back toward him, he still looked confused, and faintly distressed. “It’s not important,” he said, but his dismissiveness did nothing to clear Dimitri’s expression. “Just some stupid family disagreements.”

“That must be difficult,” Dimitri said. “I’m afraid that I … cannot relate. I lost most of my family.” 

“Oh, jesus christ,” Felix said in brief French, looking up at Dimitri. “I’m sorry. And here I am, just rambling on about how hard it is to have a fight with my father?” 

“Oh, don’t feel embarrassed,” Dimitri added before Felix could say another word. “I lost them quite some time ago. I’ve mostly … come to grips with it, at this point. Or so I’d like to hope.” He shrugged. “Please, there’s no need for you to apologize. You couldn’t have known, and I took no offense.” 

“That doesn’t excuse me for not thinking before I spoke,” Felix said, and folded his arms. “I’m sorry, even if you don’t want to accept my apology. I shouldn’t subject you to my personal drama in the first place.” 

“I don’t mind,” Dimitri said. Felix wasn’t sure how to respond to that, shifting on his heels, glancing back toward the parking lot. Should he say goodbye and leave? Dimitri was looking out over the scene around them, the snow-covered bushes, the lights of the road beside them glowing dimly. 

“Well,” Felix said, at last.

“If you’d really like to make it up to me —” Dimitri started at the same moment. He cut himself off, and Felix watched as a slight blush spread across his cheeks. It accentuated everything else about the man, including how ridiculous he looked with his hood around his face. He looked like a cartoon lion. “Now it’s I who must apologize,” he said. “I did not mean to interrupt.” 

“You didn’t interrupt,” Felix said, leaning against one of the thigh-high planters beside the two of them. “Go on, then. If I want to make it up to you …”

Dimitri swallowed visibly, and then steeled his shoulders. He looked somehow younger than he could possibly be. At the _youngest,_ the guy was a firm 20, and Felix really doubted the gap between their ages was even that much. Something about the way Dimitri’s cheekbones slanted, or the lines beside his visible eye … Who knew. But the gestures he took made him look more like an anxious teenager, trying his best to please. 

“If you’d like to make it up to me,” he said at last, “then you could let me get to know you better.” 

“I beg your pardon?” Felix asked, looking up at the other man. He really wished they could have had this conversation inside. He was glad he’d put his hood back up, but he suspected it made him look just as comical as Dimitri. But he was unwilling to take it down when it had to be below zero. The tips of his ears wouldn’t thank him for it.

“You’ve been so closed off while we work,” Dimitri said. “I can understand it. Whatever you’re trying to find must be painful. I know what I’m trying to find certainly is. But I hardly need to know that.” The man before him shruggled, relaxing a bit with the motion. “I’d like to get to know _you._ Felix Fraldarius. What you do day-to-day. What your family and friends are like.” A shy little smile flickered across his face. “Maybe even what sort of coffee you like?” 

Felix had spent much of his teenage years completely oblivious to flirting. According to his father, he’d been quite the little heartbreaker in middle school, even though Felix had no idea what he was talking about. When Felix was seventeen, Sylvain had finally grown fed up of it and told him that someone in their class was attempting to flirt with him. Felix had done his best to let the poor girl down gently, but from then on, he’d tried to become more aware of when someone was making a pass at him.

Dimitri was making a pass at him. 

His mind initially went blank. He wished that he had literally any experience with situations like this. How did a man respond to someone being so forward, even if they were so awkward about it? He reeled himself back in. This wasn’t a guaranteed date, and he didn’t have to promise anyting now. Hell, Dimitri was barely even asking for much beyond the beginnings of friendship. Even if that _was_ flirting at the end, and Felix didn’t have any illusions about that. 

So, a friendship, or the beginnings of one. And maybe — _maybe_ — something happening, down the line. If they both decided that they were amenable to it. Felix had no idea how he felt about that part. He had plenty of time to figure it out. 

“Alright,” he said, and extended one of his arms. “You have my word.”

“There’s no need to be so serious about it,” Dimitri replied, but he sounded more amused than angry. He brought his own hand out to grasp Felix’s. “You’re obviously welcome to ask me anything, as well,” Dimitri said. “I’d be a bit of a monster if this arrangement only went one way, wouldn’t I?” He gave Felix’s hand a vigorous shake. “We’re agreed. Then. This same time next week?” 

Dimitri had gotten a specific time out of him after all. “Sure,” he said. “See you then?” 

“See you then,” Dimitri said, with another hearty pump of Felix’s arm. He brushed past Felix, headed off toward the parking lot. Felix didn’t dare follow too close. He wasn’t sure that he was yet ready for the intimacy of awkward smalltalk with this man. Maybe next time. Maybe several research sessions from now. And maybe never.

He waited for a good five minutes, feeling the wind on his cheeks, and then finally, turned to go back home.

-

Their meeting time became Tuesday afternoons.

Dimitri was apologetic, but they couldn’t meet any earlier, he claimed. He didn’t offer any reasons for that, but there were dozens, and Felix knew that it wasn’t any of his business. Maybe he had work or family obligations. Maybe he just didn’t want to bother — though Felix suspected that probably wasn’t the case. He’d seen Dimitri at least twice a week, before, and sometimes almost every day. 

But it wasn’t his place to ask. Tuesdays worked just fine, especially now that he had no plans to meet with Sylvain and Ingrid for coffee anytime soon. Maybe eventually he’d get over it, but he was still spitting mad, for now. 

“So,” Dimitri said, after they’d worked out their schedule. He had that same puppydog energy from last time, and frankly, now he looked so friendly and open that Felix couldn’t even imagine finding him intimidating. He was roughly as threatening as a plush toy. It was hard not to wonder what Dimitri did for work, or in the rest of his life, outside of these library walls. Did he live in the city? What were his friends like? Outside of his father, who had apparently known Rodrigue at some point in the past, what was his family like?

They were all horrendously inappropriate questions, and Felix honestly couldn’t fathom why they all sprung to his mind. 

Well, he could fathom, but it was nonsense regardless. Doubtless it had to do with the strange sense of familiarity he got in Dimitri’s presence, but he’d long since dismissed it as a creation of his mind, looking for connections where there were none. The same way that he’d thought that Dimitri was — what, some sort of hitman? It was roughly as rational, and twice as embarrassing. At least his suspicions of Dimitri following him hadn’t implied some sort of _history._

“I’m sick of looking at newspapers,” Felix said. “I have some car recall records I’ve been checking into from a few years ago, but I can’t imagine that’s relevant at all to whatever you want.”

Dimitri thought about it, placing a hand to his chin in an almost caricatured fashion. He looked like a cartoon of someone deep in thought. “I’m not sure it is,” he murmured. “But then again, I’m not sure it isn’t, to be honest with you.” At once, his broad, toothy smile was back, shining in the dim light where they sat in the corner. “So, I suppose that means I’d be happy to help you out, Felix.” 

A flush rose to Felix’s cheeks briefly. He coughed and shook his head. Dimitri, for his part, seemed entirely oblivious. “Alright, then. Recall records.” Then a thought came to his mind. “The ones I want were checked out a week ago. Was that you?”

“It might have been,” Dimitri said, his grin turning a bit bashful. “I hardly know which ones you want. But I don’t think I found anything that could help me. That said, I may have missed something, or you may be looking at different records than I was. And, as I said before, the least I can do to make up for frustrating you is help you out a bit without expecting repayment.” 

“You don’t owe me anything,” Felix reminded him, and set off with the other man on his heels. 

An hour later, they’d found nothing. One of the newspaper articles had mentioned the make and model of the car Glenn had been in when he died, but there were no recent records related to that car. Felix frowned, debating on what he needed to do next. He could check previous years for recalls that, perhaps, the car hadn’t been properly serviced for. He could also run an online search for recalls, but it was hard to say how helpful either route would be. He didn’t have any information on the _specific_ car. No license plate, no VIN. 

“No luck, then,” Dimitri said, as Felix closed the volume before them and let out an exasperated breath. 

“No,” he replied. “Nothing. I should have known this would be a dead end, but I think you know how it is. Sometimes you just want to find an easy solution.” 

Dimitri let out a bark of laughter, but there was nothing mocking about it. He shook his head, his hair falling around his shoulders. He’d had it trimmed since Felix had last seen him, but the length was only slightly shorter. “Yes,” he said, and took the book from Felix. There were a few other volumes there, from earlier decades, but looking at them made Felix ill. Given the choice between reading another volume and eating it, the decision would have been difficult. 

He was beginning to see what Sylvain had been saying, and for a moment he winced as he remembered the things he’d said. Maybe he had gotten carried away. That was beginning to become a pattern in his life. Exploding in a way that hurt everyone around him, and then realizing it later. But, of course, he could never change and just stop fucking hurting people. 

“I’m going to be honest with you, Dimitri,” he said, standing up. He picked up the other books. Dimitri let out a startled grunt and reached for the books, but Felix shrugged him off. “I think this entire line of thought is a dead end. I should have listened when you said you couldn’t find anything.” 

“Well, come now, Felix,” Dimitri said. “It was still worth a try. And frankly, I don’t mind an afternoon with nothing gained, so long as it’s spent in good company.” 

That was at least the third pass that Dimitri had made at him, and Felix was beginning to wonder if Dimitri even knew he was doing it. The last two times Felix had brushed him off, Dimitri hadn’t even seemed aware of what he was talking about. This time, he chose to ignore it. 

“Well, we did my idea,” Felix said. “What do you want to look at?”

Dimitri glanced out over the rest of the library. Felix, turning away from the open spaces and tables spread out on the floor, deposited the books on one of the return carts. Frankly, if Dimitri told him that he wanted to call it off for the day, he’d agree. And, similarly, if Dimitri decided this was enough help on Felix’s research and he needed to focus on his own, Felix wouldn’t blame him.

Though he would, despite himself, miss Dimitri’s presence. There was something grounding about having another person there as he worked.

“Let’s just take a moment to rest, shall we?” 

“What?” Felix asked, blankly. 

“Well, it’s starting to get a bit late for this, tonight, don’t you think? Have you eaten yet?”

Twice in two minutes was a new one for Dimitri’s possibly accidental flirting, but Felix was too exhausted to respond in a way that would have been properly cutting. Besides that, the last thing Dimitri deserved was for Felix to tear him apart. Felix had already been rude enough to him, and as he was thinking about far too much today, the last thing he wanted was to explode all over another friend and drive them off. 

Though, frankly, it was probably a bit soon to even think of Dimitri as a friend. 

“I’m not hungry,” he replied. Dimitri had turned away, once again scanning the rest of the library, so if he reacted to what Felix said, Felix had no idea. “But we can take a break. Maybe clearing my head will help.” 

He and Dimitri retreated to the same table from earlier, tucked away in a corner that wasn’t exactly well-frequented. The crowd of the library might have started to thin as the hours went on, but it was still enough people that he preferred not to deal with them. Dimitri, for his part, seemed to feel the same. He’d always been hanging about the quieter shelves and corners, even before the two of them had actually spoken. 

Felix rubbed his face as Dimitri set his bag on the table and pulled out what appeared to be some sort of textbook. _Formativity and Forgetting: The World Of Memory Therapy_ was written in thick letters above an illustration Felix couldn’t quite make out. It looked like the sort of book that had the potential to change the world, but ultimately had ended up a fad the same way as so many other pop-psychology movements. Especially given the fact that the term vaguely hit on something in Felix’s mind, but not anything relevant enough that he remembered details. He glanced up at Dimitri’s face, trying to deduce why the hell he’d even be looking into something that sounded like New Age nonsense.

“If you’d rather,” Dimitri said, opening the book to a page marked with a ribbon, “I can read while you clear your mind. I’d hate to be a distraction, especially if you really are that upset.” 

“What?” Felix asked. Dimitri, as though Felix hadn’t understood or had missed it, held up the book and offered a smile. “No,” Felix replied, incredulous. “No, obviously fucking not. Don’t be stupid. I’m not going to tell you to shut up.” Dimitri waited. Despite himself, Felix didn’t skewer him for his taste in reading material. He needed to get that sort of thing under control. Instead, he ran one hand through his hair as he properly finished his thought. “In fact, I think I’d appreciate a conversation right now.” 

“Oh!” Dimitri said, clearly surprised — but pleasantly so, and he put the book back into his bag. “That’s certainly the least I could do for you, Felix.”

“You keep saying things like that,” Felix said. He leaned back, crossing his legs under the table and folding his arms. Ever the golden retriever, Dimitri blinked guilelessly at him. “‘It’s the least I can do,’ and all of that. You don’t owe me anything. I know that you’ve convinced yourself that it’s somehow your fault I was an absolute ponce when we first spoke, but you don’t need to apologize, or make it up to me.” 

“Not even if I want to?” 

Felix glared at Dimitri, sitting across the table from him. Dimitri, for his part, seemed completely unaware of the fact that he was being obtuse and frustrating. 

“I don’t mean it as charity, or as pity, if that’s what you’re concerned about,” Dimitri added, his words quick. Felix felt slightly embarrassed that his complaints were apparently so obvious. “The truth is, Felix, I don’t have that many friends. And I was hoping that, perhaps, we could get to know one another better.”

Felix actually believed that one hadn’t been intentionally flirty. “I can’t see why,” he replied, accordingly. “I’ve hardly been very pleasant to you. One day I’m accusing you of spying on me, the next I barely bother to help you research and mostly drag you along on my own wild goose chase.” 

“You’re helping me plenty,” Dimitri reassured him. “I suspect we must just be investigating similar subjects. Though I do wish the archive wasn’t missing a few papers. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of the article that I suspect would do me the most good.”

At that, Felix unfolded his arms and leaned forward. “You noticed, too,” he said. “What kind of archive is missing three days’ worth of newspapers?”

Dimitri nodded, leaning forward himself to rest his elbows on the table and lace his fingers together. “I asked a few librarians about it, you know,” he said. “The first few I asked didn’t have any idea what I was talking about, but eventually one of them said it’s some sort of legal issue. She said she couldn’t tell me any more than that, but that she was sorry that the information I needed was gone.”

Felix leaned back again. From their little corner, the circulation desk and the various librarian stations were all completely out of view. But then again, whatever was going on likely had nothing to do with any of them. They were just the ones who had to put up with the aftermath and explain it to people like him. Someone with a lot more power than they had would have needed to have the papers pulled from the archive. 

“If it’s a legal issue, then searching the newspaper’s website likely won’t turn anything up, either.” Felix frowned, rubbing at his mouth as he considered which of his options this news had completely eliminated. “Likely, any other local papers will have had the same days pulled. There might be something on the wayback machine …” 

“I suspect,” Dimitri interrupted, his tone apologetic, “that anyone with enough power to pull newspapers from a city library would already have issued several cease-and-desist orders for websites like that. We can certainly look, though, if you’d like.”

No. Dimitri was almost definitely right. Felix looked up at the ceiling, letting out an exasperated breath, and then shook his head as he returned his attention to the man sitting across the way. As always, it was impossible not to notice how attractive he was — and impossible to not be distracted by the sense of familiarity itching in the back of his mind. He took a deep breath, counted to ten, and then continued with his mind a little bit calmer.

“You know,” he said. “My friends and my father all tell me that there’s nothing fucking here. But the more I dig into this, the more weird coincidences I find. A fucking newspaper being removed from the local library’s archives? That’s _weird._ It doesn’t make sense unless something shady is going on.”

“For what it’s worth, I concur,” Dimitri replied. “But I’m not sure what recourse we could possibly have.”

“None,” Felix replied. “That’s the real bitch of it all.” Even as he complained about it, and even as he let questions circle his mind about what would lead to a situation like this one, he put the idea of speaking to Rodrigue about it out of his mind. The last thing he wanted, right now, was to cause his father more distress. Maybe — once he was willing to speak to either of them again — he could ask Sylvain or Ingrid. But he suspected that this was, at last, something they knew nothing about. And he also suspected that it still wouldn’t change their opinion of his search. 

“We can stop for today,” Dimitri said, gently. Felix pulled himself back out of his murky thoughts. He was thankful for the interruption. There was no need to catastrophize this.

“No,” he said. “I think that there’s probably other routes we can pursue, but there’s no sense in wallowing over the archive. Honestly, I’m mostly just relieved to have an answer. I thought maybe they were just incompetent.” 

It was, frankly, incredibly rude of him. Dimitri stared at him for a moment, and then snorted loudly and began to laugh.

“Quiet down!” Felix snapped. “Unless you want to get in trouble.” 

“You’re right, you’re right,” Dimitri said, voice quiet again. He shook his head, still chuckling. “I simply wasn’t expecting something so blunt, to be honest with you. It caught me off guard.” He snorted again. 

“Weird thing to find funny, but I guess it doesn’t matter.” Felix sighed, turning to let his eyes roll over the shelves. In this part of the library, they were mostly empty. Maybe they should call the whole thing off. Maybe their entire purpose here was pointless. Maybe the trail _was_ dead, the way Sylvain kept telling him, but it was because of — what, some kind of coverup? That was as absurd as his ridiculous assumption that Dimitri had been stalking him. 

“I find it … nostalgic, somehow.” 

Felix paused in his thoughts. He slowly turned to look at Dimitri again, but Dimitri’s gaze wasn’t on him. He was looking at the table with a distant expression, somehow wistful.

There were a lot of responses he could give to Dimitri. He could say he sometimes felt the same thing. He could explain that he’d had an intense sense of familiarity since they’d first spoken, and he’d never been able to place it. He could ask what, exactly, about him felt so nostalgic. Or if, maybe, he reminded Dimitri of someone else, someone from his childhood. 

He had no right to ask about any of it. Dimitri’s life was his own, and the two of them hardly even knew each other. Trying to mine for details would have been insensitive, especially when whatever Dimitri was investigating was presumably just as sensitive and raw to him as Glenn’s death was to Felix. And likely, if he was making that expression, then whatever Felix reminded him of was also sensitive. 

“Sorry if I upset you,” he said, instead of asking questions.

“No, not at all.” Dimitri didn’t look at him, yet, but his distant expression shifted slightly, a smile crossing his lips. “I find it a bit of a comfort. There’s — some dark spots in my memory, I’m afraid, so I can’t tell you much about it. But it reassures me, a bit, that those memories are still there. Just … tucked away, where I can’t access.” 

“You said something about this before. A medical condition, right?”

“Yes, exactly.” Dimitri finally raised his head to meet Felix’s gaze. “But you didn’t ask about any of that. My apologies. Would you like to get back to work?”

Really, Felix wanted to do nothing less. He wanted, instead, to sit there with Dimitri, learning more about him, mining their mutual sense of familiarity for details. Maybe he could bring some comfort to the other man. On the other hand, maybe the other man would help him settle the unnerving anxiety he’d had since he’d seen Dimitri the first time. But he wasn’t selfish enough to ask for that. Whatever Dimitri’s condition was, it obviously caused him distress. Felix remembered the pained, confused tension between his eyebrows when he’d been looking at a few of the obituary pages and police reports. He didn’t want to bring Dimitri any more pain than he had already suffered. 

“Yeah,” he said, and stood up. “Let’s get back to work.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be sure to check out [the art by buaylomatcha](https://twitter.com/bualoymatcha/status/1325171097650696194) and [the art by chusyds!](https://twitter.com/chusyds/status/1325168134886658048)


	3. Chapter 3

“So!” Sylvain said over the blaring jazz coming out of the speakers overhead. “Not that I’m not glad you’re back, Felix, but this is … what? Five weeks later?” 

“Four,” Felix sighed, folding his arms. “But it’s not like we were planning to meet the last week of December, anyway, so I don’t know what you’re so offended about.”

“That’s still three weeks,” Ingrid replied. 

“I was angry,” Felix said, and then, trying to be the reasonable person for once, “and I should have calmed down sooner. Can we please put this behind us? I was hoping all I would have to do is apologize, not grovel.” 

Both of his friends gave him unimpressed looks. 

“Well,” Ingrid said, “I think _I’m_ about to wait for some groveling.” 

Ten minutes later, they all sat at the same table, but with coffee and several baked goods spread between them. Felix sighed as he took a long drink of his coffee. Ingrid finally nodded as she inspected the cheese Danish that Felix had picked out for her. 

“We have decided we accept your offering,” Sylvain said, and then reached over to clap Felix on the shoulder. “So like I was saying, bud, what brings you back our way? Where you been, these past weeks? Stewing all on your lonesome?” 

Felix sighed, setting his coffee back down. Sometimes it was impossible to tell if Sylvain heard anything besides his own voice. “Do you ever listen to a thing I say?” he asked. “I told you that I was going to find out what happened to Glenn, and that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. I’ve been at the library, looking up whatever I can find about the accident. His obituary. Information about the car he was in. Did you think I was just bluffing, about all of it?”

Sylvain had the grace, at least, to grimace, though it was impossible to tell what the grimace was directed at. Ingrid, who had previously been digging in to her pastry with gusto, had now put it down and was taking a drink of her coffee, looking squarely away from Felix. 

“I didn’t think you were bluffing,” Sylvain said. “Didn’t we go over this? I know exactly how you get when you have something to prove, or when you’ve made up your mind. I figured you’d deliver on that for, you know. One week, maybe two. And then you’d give up because the trail had gone dry.” 

“The trail hasn’t gone dry,” Felix retorted.

The trail was in severe danger of going dry. There had been almost nothing to begin with. A few scraps of obituaries. Car information. Lists of the victims. But that was about it, and most of those records were drying up, too. _Especially_ with those missing papers still drifting around, eternally out of his reach. Felix was going to have to start looking into what had happened to the survivors, and he’d hesitated to even look up their names, much less anything more. They’d been children when the accident happened. He had no right to dig up old trauma for his own wild goose case. 

“Well, obviously, the trail’s still wet as a whistle,” Sylvain replied, though his tome was a little too humoring for Felix’s taste. “So I was wrong on that one! Way to go, me! I thought you’d crawl back to us after two weeks, we’d go through our standard Felix-fucked-up-and-owes-us-snacks routine, and then we could go back to normal.” 

Maybe coming here had been a mistake, after all. Felix bit down his anger, trying to remind himself of how badly he regretted snapping at Rodrigue, all those weeks ago. The fight that they’d had before had been so idiotic, but here Sylvain was, trying to dig it back up.

“Why can’t you understand this is important to me?” he asked, instead. He imagined Sylvain could hear the ragged edge of anger in his tone. He certainly could hear it, himself. “I get that you had your time to move on and mourn or whatever. I never had.”

“Because you never let yourself,” Sylvain replied. Ingrid was still squarely not looking at the two of them. “You had every opportunity to mourn. You had every opportunity to accept Glenn was gone and let him go, and —”

“Oh, because I’m supposed to just move on without knowing —”

Ingrid stood up and slammed her cup down onto the table between them. Felix and Sylvain both jumped in their seats. Felix looked up at Ingrid, who looked not angry, but — miserable.

“If you two are going to start another _incredibly_ stupid fight about this,” she said, in a voice as even as the edge of the horizon, “then I’m leaving and not talking to either of you for a week. And since I’m gone, Felix will have to give Sylvain a ride home instead.”

“He took the train,” Sylvain said, without any reaction to what Ingrid had just said. Then, his entire face scrunched as he considered the thread he’d just been given. “And besides, I’d take a fucking Uber first.” 

“Shut up!” Felix snapped at him. “Unless you _want_ her to go.” 

Sylvain, at least, did seem to realize he’d made a mistake in joking about this. He winced, head sinking slightly between his shoulders like he was attempting to withdraw into a turtle shell. 

Ingrid let go of her coffee cup and rose back to her feet. Her eyes were damp, though she wasn’t crying. She shook herself like that had taken everything she had. Her chest was heaving. She took a few moments to calm down, and then she looked down at the two of them.

“So?” she asked, raising her chin like a queen.

“Sorry,” Sylvain said, at once, raising his hands toward Felix. “No, don’t apologize to me, I started this one. I should take you more seriously. And I should stop trying to get you to see everything my way. Ingrid’s told me this a million times, I’m too eager to be right.” 

“I still owe you an apology anyway,” Felix said, looking away from Sylvain. “I shouldn’t be so defensive. I know you’re trying to look out for me.” 

Ingrid let out a breath she’d apparently been holding, and sank back down into her chair. “Thank you,” she said. “Can we go back to acting like regular human beings, now?” 

“Well,” Sylvain said, “Sure. Let’s start. What’s up with you, Felix? We had to start classes again.” 

It was strange how a conversation that had been so confrontational a few minutes ago turned into small talk with such ease. Maybe the three of them were just eager to put the last month behind them. Felix knew that he was, at least. He wished he could commiserate with Sylvain about courses, but the thought of classes right now felt as vague and frustrating as anything else in his life. He still wasn’t sure what he wanted out of university, and he wasn’t sure that was going to change anytime soon. His father would let him live at home as long as he wanted, even rent-free. But that, too, felt like spinning his wheels and getting nowhere at all. 

Still, not being in school left him feeling a bit disconnected from the conversation. Sylvain and Ingrid shared stories about their professors, gripes about textbooks, complaints about how parking prices had gone up. Felix understood what they were talking about, but had no context of his own from the past several months. 

He felt alone, a bit.

It was an idiotic line of thought, but the more Ingrid and Sylvain talked and shared stories, the more Felix swore he could feel them moving forward and away from him. He could try to catch up, once he re-enrolled, but he’d always be lagging behind. For that matter, he was pretty sure the two of them were growing into one another, their lives intertwining more and more. Sylvain could date random women all he liked, but there was a light in his eyes, sometimes, when he talked to Ingrid. Felix knew that Sylvain had always nursed a crush on her. And, for Ingrid’s part, she seemed to enjoy Sylvain’s sense of humor despite himself. 

One day, they were going to get married and their paths would continue moving, together, away from Felix.

He shook himself. This was ridiculous. There was no reason for him to be so negative about the whole thing. He would always be a part of Sylvain and Ingrid’s lives and he knew it. He wasn’t going to be alone forever. And even if he was, he would have them.

“Felix? You okay?”

He jerked back out of his self-induced melancholy. “Fine,” he said. “Just got distracted. I wasn’t exactly interested in hearing more out of your little black book.”

“Rude,” Sylvain retorted. He shifted, leaning back. It took clear effort for him to say what he did next, though Felix respected the motive behind it. “So,” he swallowed and licked his lips, “uh, how is your … research … coming?” 

“Honestly,” Felix said, tired of hiding stupid things from his best friends, “it’s going bad. There’s not a lot to find. I was just bluffing earlier.”

“Thought that was probably the case,” Sylvain admitted.

“Yes, Sylvain, you didn’t exactly hide that,” Ingrid interrupted. She turned her attention to Felix. “But you’ve been researching for a month,” she said. Her voice was so intent and sincere that he was sure she was earnest.

“If by researching, you mean poring over the same five newspaper articles and the same few death records and car reports,” he said with a snort. He put his coffee cup down after taking another drink, leaning against the cold window with one shoulder. Outside, the roads were still fairly fresh-plowed after a night of snow. A few people walked by, headed toward the shopping center down the street. Everyone who passed was bundled high with scares and coats. Glenn had died five years ago. He had to face the increasing reality that Glenn had died in a completely normal accident. From winter weather or recklessness or just pure accident. It could have been anything. 

But the missing newspapers still lingered in his mind.

“Are you going to quit?” Sylvain asked.

“No,” Felix said. He could have told Sylvain and Ingrid about the missing part of the archive. Why would it be incomplete, unless there was something to hide? But then again, what would the two of them have to say about it? More obtuse nonsense? More exchanged glances and assurances that no, Felix, that was completely normal?

Or maybe, a perfectly reasonable explanation, just as so many other things had turned out to be completely reasonable?

He kept quiet.

Sylvain sighed, running one hand through his hair. “I thought you’d say that,” he said. “Was hoping you wouldn’t, but figured you would.”

“I really might have done what you said and just given up,” Felix said. “After two weeks, right to the day. But I’ve had someone helping me out, and fuck if he isn’t optimistic about being able to find answers.” 

“You have a research assistant?” Sylvain asked, incredulous. “Where do I gotta go to get hooked up with one of those? Do I have to investigate something like what made Miklan such an asshole? Let me tell you, that’s a mystery for the ages. I’m going to be researching that for the rest of my life.” 

“He’s not a research assistant,” Felix finally interrupted. “He’s a friend. He’s looking into something of his own. I think it must have happened around the same time. He kept checking out the records I wanted. So we’re helping each other with what we can.” He decided to leave out the bit about Dimitri inviting him out for coffee, and definitely left out how he had not yet followed up on the invitation. Sylvain would never let him hear the end of it. “And I don’t want any wolf-whistles,” he added, sharply. “Everything with him is just — friendly. Professional.” 

That had, in retrospect, been poorly phrased. Now Sylvain was certain to give him grief about how he’d entertained the thought, or he never would have said that. And then Felix would have to explain that Dimitri had asked him out, and that he was squarely not interested. 

Sylvain, however, didn’t say a single mocking word. Felix watched him over the lid of his coffee, and his friend seemed to be considering, very deeply, what to say. When Felix looked over at Ingrid, she looked as puzzled as he felt. 

“You said,” Sylvain glanced at Felix, and then at Ingrid, “that he had something happen at around the same time?” 

“That’s what I’ve deduced from what he’s been looking at,” Felix said. “He hasn’t said anything about it directly, aside from that it was several years ago, but it’s easy enough to place. He and I were looking for an article on the exact same date, once.” 

“Yeah, I guess that makes sense,” Sylvain said, and flashed a smile at Felix. There was something fake about it, the way it didn’t fully crease Sylvain’s cheeks or reach the corners of his eyes. “Just glad you’ve got somebody helping you out. I don’t know about you, but I always think libraries are a little bit spooky.” 

Instead of deriding Sylvain on his disdain for places of learning, Ingrid leaned toward Felix. It was very disconcerting to have so much of both of their attention, after he’d just been worrying that they were leaving him behind. 

“What’s he like?” she asked.

Was she really driving toward the romance of it when he’d just scolded Sylvain for any ideas he might get? “He’s … polite?” he offered.

“I, too, long for people to remember nothing more about me than my etiquette,” Sylvain said solemnly. But when Felix looked back at him, he wasn’t grinning at all. He had one hand to his chin in what appeared to be deep thought. 

“Well, he’s fucking polite,” Felix replied. “I don’t know what to tell you, here. He’s always eager to help me look for anything I need, almost to a fault. He keeps saying things like, ‘of course, it’s the least I can do to help’ even though he doesn’t owe me a damn thing.” If he talked too much about Dimitri’s personality, he _was_ certain that Sylvain would start teasing him, so he diverted, instead, to a more physical description. “He’s about our age. I think he probably goes to school in town. We had to rearrange our schedule for some commitment of his, and it could have been classes, like Ingrid said. Big guy. Kind of looks like a bruiser when you first see him.” He vividly remembered his impression of Dimitri as a hired thug. “Blonde hair cut long. Usually he wears it in a ponytail. Only has one eye? I don’t know, what the fuck do you want, here?” 

Ingrid’s face had previously been fairly blank, but now her expression had changed completely. Her face had gone pale and her lips were thin, pressed together tight. Sylvain still had his fist against his mouth, his brow furrowed like he was coming up with a replacement for the theory of relativity. The jazz from overhead still blared out, loud and almost obnoxious. The saxophones had no respect for a quiet conversation. 

“What?” Felix finally demanded, after the silence from his friends had stretched long enough to drive him a bit crazy. “What about this has both of you so — weird? I can make friends besides the two of you. I’m not that unlikable.” 

“No, that’s not it,” Ingrid assured him, and her expression smoothed back out as she spoke. She smiled. “In fact, I’m with Sylvain on this. Though,” she gave him a sour look, “not for the same idiotic reasons. It’s just good to know that you have someone to talk to, so you don’t get lost in your own thoughts. I know how much you do that.” She reached out and patted Felix’s wrist. 

_Why does this feel so strangely artificial?_ Felix wanted to ask. He glanced over at Sylvain, but his tense stance had vanished and now he was leaning back in his chair like he was bored. 

“When do you guys meet up, anyway?” Sylvain asked, stretching to put his hands behind his head. 

“Tuesdays,” Felix said. “Usually around five. We’re meeting up after I’m done here, actually.” 

“No wonder you’ve managed to search for so long,” Sylvain said, and this time his laugh did at least seem genuine. “If you’ve only been doing it once a week.” Felix opened his mouth to bite back, but Sylvain held up a hand and shook his head. “No, no, not mocking. Just think I probably would have burned out a lot harder and faster than you, is all.” 

Felix shrugged, glancing out the window again. The streets were busy, but they always were in this part of town. Frankly, them being deserted would have been much more strange. He let his eyes slide over the moving people without ever settling on a single one. “It was still the anniversary of Glenn’s death, on the twentieth,” he murmured. “We had to … observe. I didn’t want to spend that day at the library. And the end of the year is always busy.”

“And your research partner might have classes,” Ingrid said.

“Right,” Felix replied. “So … that’s just how it ended up. I don’t mind. I did it more frequently, before we started working together, but it just felt pointless to do it by myself and then explain to him, every time, where I’d left off.”

“That makes perfect sense,” Sylvain said. 

After that, though, the silence stretched between them again. Felix began to wonder if there was something that wasn’t being said, here. Were the two of them still upset? Were they worried about him and his mysterious research partner? Did they think there was more to it that he was refusing to tell them? Why had Ingrid’s happiness for him felt so feigned?

“I guess we’d better head out,” he said. He didn’t feel like asking them any of the questions he had would get him answers, and it was obvious that the conversation had ground itself to a halt.

“Oh,” Sylvain said, “yeah, maybe. I guess.” He didn’t move, even as Felix stood up and picked up his own bag. Ingrid, too, didn’t stand up, even though her cup was empty and the Danish was long-since gone. Felix threw his own empty cup away, returned to the table, and still, his two friends sat, unmoving. Not even looking at one another.

“What the hell is going on with you two?” Felix finally said. “You’ve been weird for the past — what, ten minutes? Maybe longer. Maybe that’s just when I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

“Felix,” Sylvain said in the most serious tone Felix had ever heard from him, “I’m gonna be honest with you, because I owe it to you with everything I _can’t_ do to help. I need to talk to Ingrid, right now, without you here.” 

It was like being slapped in the face. 

“What is that supposed to mean?” he demanded. Sylvain, at least, had the decency to look embarrassed. “What, are you going to make a love confession, all of a sudden? If that’s the case, I want to be here for it so I can see her laugh in your face. The way you two dance around each other is obscene. I can’t imagine how you put up with it.” 

“Felix.” This time it was Ingrid. Her tone was incredibly soft, the way she had spoken to animals at the petting zoo when they’d been younger. Usually after one of them had gotten spooked, though he’d never been able to figure out what on earth they were so afraid of. “Sylvain is right. We — he and I — need to talk about something, and I don’t think it’s something you can be here for.”

“What can’t I be here for?” he demanded. His voice was a little wild. He tried to keep it low, at least, remembering the flustered teenagers from last time. “We’re — anything you two need to talk about, I can be here for. Can’t I?”

“Not this,” Ingrid said. When Felix glanced back over at Sylvain, he was staring at the grain of the table, his hands wrapped tight around his coffee cup. Ingrid sighed, and Felix returned his attention to her as she slowly shook her head. “I wish that you could be here. Ideally, we can talk to you once we — once we have a better understanding of what’s happening. And then, I promise, Felix, it’ll all make sense.” 

“I don’t believe you,” Felix said. He felt strange, leaving the two of them here, but the last thing he wanted was another fight and it was clear that was the last thing either of them wanted, as well. This wasn’t them doing somehting to shut him out, even if his instincts cried out that it absolutely, definitively was. Whatever was going on, both of them looked sick over it. 

“I’m sorry,” Sylvain said. He hadn’t moved from staring at the table. 

Fuck.

Sylvain never apologized properly for anything. But that was twice today, and even if the first time had, squarely, been earned, Felix had no idea what had happened to earn this one. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe whatever Felix didn’t know about this was exactly why he couldn’t be there.

“Alright,” Felix said. He took a step back, inhaling deeply, forcing himself calm. There were too many things to consider. Did Rodrigue know what was going on? Did this have to do with the fact that no one — no one! — would talk to him about Glenn? He couldn’t imagine it was about anything else. Had there actually been a conspiracy all along, and now he was coming to the truth of it? “Alright,” he repeated. “Fine. But I’m going to want answers about this, and you know it.” 

“You’ll get them.” Sylvain lifted his head from the table and met Felix’s eyes. His expression looked, frankly, haunted, but there was a spark in his eyes. Whatever came from him and Ingrid speaking privately, Felix knew that Sylvain intended to see that promise through. “I swear.” 

“Alright,” Felix said. He inhaled again. “Then I guess I’ll talk to you later.” 

“I’m sorry, Felix,” Ingrid echoed Sylvain’s earlier words. 

“Yeah,” Felix replied. “This better end up going — _somewhere._ I swear to god, Sylvain. Ingrid. I don’t know what the fuck is going on. But you better tell me, at some point.” That sounded harsh. He breathed in, remembered his father’s wounded face and his own sinking stomach, and said, “I trust you. Don’t make me regret it.” 

“We won’t,” Ingrid said. Both of them having promised him as much soothed Felix’s nerves. One way or another, he would get his answers, even if Sylvain and Ingrid apparently had to talk it out by themselves, without him. He rose to his full height, looking around the mostly-empty store. There were no in-and-out holiday crowds, now, and leaving his friends there alone felt strange. Like if he walked out the door, he’d never see them again. The conspiracy that had taken Glenn from him threatened to consume both of them. 

This wasn’t a movie, he reminded himself. Nothing was going to happen. This was like the moment he’d first met Dimitri, when he’d been so certain that he’d been cornered by some kind of thug. It was fine. It was probably something completely innocuous, and he was all blowing it out of proportion.

Still, at the door, he glanced back. Ingrid and Sylvain were huddled together, talking in voices so hushed that from here, Felix couldn’t hear a word. There was definitely something going on, and the fact that Felix couldn’t begin to fathom what it was meant that it had to be — at least a little bit — serious. 

He pushed through the door, let it swing shut behind him, and exhaled. His foggy breath hung in the air for an instant before dissipating, and he paused as he considered where to go next. He glanced down at his phone. He still had an hour. Dimitri wouldn’t care if he started early, and he sorely needed something else to focus on. He let out another breath, wrapped his scarf a bit tighter around his neck, and then walked back toward the train station. 

-

“You’re early today.”

Felix glanced up from his aimless leafing through the same December archive book that they’d looked at every single time they’d gotten together to do their research. Above him stood Dimitri. He wasn’t wearing his usual heavy coat or thick shirts; instead, he was dressed like he’d just come from work, in a slick blue button-up and dark slacks. His hair was pulled back in the ponytail that Felix had gotten so used to seeing. He did look actually surprised to see Felix there, and when Felix glanced at his phone again, he could see why. It was still a full half hour before he usually showed up. 

“Yeah,” he said. “Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“Well,” Dimitri said as he took a seat beside from Felix, “maybe you just needed a second pair of eyes.” He grinned broadly, clapping one of his big hands on Felix’s shoulder. Felix tried to soothe the churning in his stomach. “Ready to get started? I see you’ve already pulled down the newspaper archive. Anything else we should check out?” 

“I don’t know,” Felix said. He sounded as listless as he felt. Dimitri’s wide smile faltered at the edges, and Felix watched as his eyebrows both pulled slowly downward. “Wherever you’d like. I’m not sure how much we’ll find.” 

Dimitri’s face twisted a bit, and he took a long moment to examine Felix. At last, he reached over and took the archive, leafing through its pages. “Well,” he said, his voice a bit too bright, “I’d like to review something from the twenty-first, if you don’t mind.” 

“Sure,” Felix said, hollowly, and leaned in as Dimitri pulled the book open to the right spot. The obituary page flashed by. It was before Rodrigue had written Glenn’s obituary, but he knew that somewhere in that list of recently-deceased was his brother’s name. The picture he’d seen so many times since starting this research haunted him. Glenn hadn’t even started college yet when he’d been killed. He was planning to go to the University of Toronto, but he’d taken a gap year. The thing about that photo that kept coming back, in Felix’s mind, was that now, his dead brother looked younger than he did. 

His eyes skimmed aimlessly over the newsprint as Dimitri looked for — whatever the hell he was looking for. It seemed likely, at this point, that if Felix hadn’t found anything, Dimitri wasn’t likely to do so either. What was there in those papers from five years ago that they could possibly hope to find? What secrets did either of them hope to unearth?

What the fuck did Sylvain and Ingrid know, and why couldn’t Felix be there when they discussed it? 

There were no pictures of the accident in the newspapers that were in the archive. He supposed the police report might have them. They’d done an investigation, after all — that knowledge had been part of what finally pushed Felix to try and find out the truth. But even if he had them in front of him, what would he see in them? Likely a lot of twisted metal, and not much else. 

Maybe the truth about the missing newspapers was that one of the survivors’ families had them pulled from circulation. Maybe the paper had printed something libelous and was cleaning up its own mistakes. Maybe —

Maybe.

He wasn’t sure how long passed, as Dimitri tried to research and, like a decent human being, make idle conversation. Felix responded with half-attentive small talk, and sometimes, with grunts or assents that hadn’t been entirely necessary. But at last, a heavy thud woke him from his daze, and he looked up to see Dimitri had closed the archive book and now stood over him.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Dimitri said in a soft voice. The same sort of voice that Ingrid had used with him at the cafe, or that she’d used with those petting zoo animals. He wondered, briefly, why he’d made that connection. Dimitri was looking at him with strange intensity. “But I feel like, perhaps, your heart isn’t in this today.” 

“Maybe it’s not,” Felix said. He wanted to say that he wasn’t sure there was anything to find. Sylvain had been right about that much. The trail was barely-there to begin with, and at this point Felix felt like he had exhausted everything. He also wanted to say that it wasn’t anything Dimitri should worry himself about, but the man looked down at him with kindness that was at once foreign, and yet entirely and heart-achingly familiar. Then what he wanted to say was, _we’ve met, haven’t we? Don’t I know you?_ “I can’t help but think that maybe there isn’t anything there to find. Maybe this entire thing has been a giant wild goose chase.”

“Ah,” Dimitri said. “I see. Let’s go get coffee, shall we?”

“I’m not going for coffee,” Felix said, “and that was so inappropriate that I think a friend of mine’s been giving you lessons.” 

Dimitri’s face went blank for a second, and then a smile flickered across his face for a moment before he managed to control himself. “No, Felix,” he said. “Not like that. I just think that perhaps it would be best for you to get somewhere more comfortable. A library isn’t exactly …” He raised his head and visibly turned from side to side. Then he lowered his head again, and now he was smiling slightly — even if it was a bit wry. “It’s not very comforting,” he finished. “I thought maybe you would prefer to talk somewhere else.” 

It was a nice offer. It was also frankly one that Felix knew he didn’t deserve. He studied Dimitri’s face, his own eyebrows drawing together as he tried to make sense of the man’s open kindness. 

“I’ve hardly told you anything about myself,” he said at last. “You barely even know me.”

“Now, that’s hardly true,” Dimitri scolded. “We’ve been working together for over a month, now, Felix. You realize that, don’t you? I’m certain you must, if you’re as fixated on the passing of time in the winter as I am.” He closed his remaining eye, his expression briefly caving in to something pained and vulnerable. Then he took a deep breath and reopened his eyes, and again, there was such bare affection there that Felix almost felt repelled by it. “Besides,” he said, very gently, like he was sitting at the side of Felix’s fucking deathbed, “I know you feel like we know one another from sometime before this, don’t you? You’ve mentioned it before.” 

A flush burned across Felix’s ears, and he felt it spreading up to the tips of his ears. He regretted ever asking about it. He remembered the moment he’d said _or at least tell me where I know you from_ with absolute crystal clarity, the sort only usually gleaned late at night when remembering awkward moments from several years ago. The request would have become one such moment on its own, eventually. But now he had to face it while it was still recent, and he would rather have burst into flames than have been reminded of it. The fact that he’d been pondering where the hell it was he knew Dimitri from only moments ago did nothing but add to the shame. What sort of fairy tale did he think this was? 

“I think I might have imagined all of that,” he said, ducking his head to try to hide his blush. Dimitri had surely already seen it. 

“Even if so, come now, Felix,” the man said in his infuriatingly smooth voice. Felix let himself glance up, but all he could see from this angle was the wide line of Dimitri’s smile. He begrudgingly raised his head to meet Dimitri’s eyes. Dimitri’s smile widened ever-so-slightly. “You’re upset,” he offered. “And we don’t have to go anywhere public, if you’d rather not. In fact …” And now he had the gall to laugh. “I actually live fairly close by, if you’d like to come with me.” 

Felix raised his eyebrows, and the blush flooded out of him like someone had pulled a stopper from a drain. “First you ask me to coffee,” he said. “And now you’re literally inviting me to your home? What is this, Dimitri? Don’t fucking tell me that you think now is a good time to make a move. If I’m so distressed — ” 

Dimitri interrupted him, holding up a hand. “I’m not trying to make a move,” he said, still soft, though the thought must have amused him, as his smile didn’t fade. “I just want you to be somewhere comfortable and hopefully private, so we can talk.” Now his expression became slightly distant, his gaze shifting from being on Felix to looking somewhere behind — or beyond — him. “I want to help you, Felix,” he said. “I appreciate that you’re … reticent. I know I have been a bit, as well, but …” His gaze sharpened again, and latched on Felix once more. “I hate to see you in pain like this,” he said. “And I would like to think, at least, that the two of us have become friends.” Now his voice sounded wistful. 

And, to be frank, it was such an absurd thing to hear said aloud that Felix almost laughed aloud. Asking if they were friends, like they were a pair of children in the schoolyard. As plain and straightforward as that, without so much as a blink or a second thought. 

“Fine,” Felix finally relented, if only because the absurdity of Dimitri’s newest request had overwhelmed his resistance. “Fine, whatever. If you stop being so — _ridiculous,_ then I’ll be happy to come along to wherever the hell you want to go. Your place, or a coffee shop, or …” He glanced about. The library was dead quiet, and close to empty. It felt the same way the cemetery did, when Felix visited Glenn’s grave. The very thought made everything else Felix was feeling seem to press in, a heavy weight that weighed on him from every angle. He stood up just for the sake of movement. He needed to get out of here, and even if Dimitri was making advances that weren’t necessarily called for, he would take it. “Anywhere that’s not here,” he finished. 

Dimitri, to his credit, also moved quickly. He nodded. “I’ll put this away,” he replied, hefting the book the two of them had spent so long poring over. “You can wait outside for me if you’d like.” He considered something, tilting his head from one side to the other. “But please don’t leave without me,” he said, smiling in a way that indicated he didn’t think this was an actual threat. “I’ll be along in just a moment.” He pulled his messenger bag over one shoulder, and then walked with long strides back into the shelves. 

Felix, who had made an entire practice out of turning down invitations offered to him, didn’t turn down this one. He left the library, but kept his steps even for his own sake. Outside the front door, he paused, his breath misting in the cold January air. He spent several minutes watching the cars pass by. It took long enough that, with anyone else — hell, even with Sylvain — Felix might have thought he was being given the runaround. But he knew, beyond anything he was even capable of understanding, that Dimitri wasn’t the type to do something like that.

Especially to Felix.

He turned that thought over, frowning, but before he could examine his own mind too deeply, Dimitri emerged. He still was dressed only in his button-down and business slacks, but he didn’t even blink as he walked through the chill air. He smiled as he caught sight of Felix, then turned to walk down the street toward a line of parked cars. Felix followed without thinking, like Dimitri’s personal shadow. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be sure to check out [the art by buaylomatcha](https://twitter.com/bualoymatcha/status/1325171097650696194) and [the art by chusyds!](https://twitter.com/chusyds/status/1325168134886658048)


	4. Chapter 4

Less than ten minutes later, Felix slammed the door of Dimitri’s car as he looked up at the house before him. It was clearly an old building and had been here for a long time. It was also fairly large, which Felix wasn’t sure what to think of. He supposed he should have guessed — people who owned houses in this part of town weren’t usually especially hard up for cash. But it was, at least, not a mansion like several others close to it. 

“Frankly, it’s too big for me,” Dimitri said, as though he’d heard Felix’s thoughts. Felix turned, then fell into step behind Dimitri as he climbed the steps and unlocked the door. 

The house was empty. Oh, there was furniture, and there were pictures along the walls. But the more Felix looked around, the more sure he became that Dimitri was the only person who lived in this tremendous house — aside from a fluffy black cat that was curled atop a throw blanket on one of the couches. There was a sitting area just inside the entryway, a dining area on the other side that presumably led to a kitchen. The lights were all off but for the ones Dimitri turned on as they stepped inside. 

“I’m home, Sascha,” Dimitri said, stepping into the sitting room to deposit his bag in one of the chairs. The black cat lifted its head, yawned, and then studied the two of them with an intent golden gaze. “Please, have a seat,” Dimitri said. “I’ll get us some coffee.” 

“That’s not necessary,” Felix said, but Dimitri had already started off, humming something cheerful and jaunty. Felix watched him until he turned a corner, vanishing from sight, and then finally lowered himself onto one of the couches, studying the photos on the walls for lack of anything else to look at. The uniting feature was a broad-shouldered, bearded man who looked about as big as Dimitri himself was now. In what was clearly a family picture, he had one arm around a brown-haired woman, with a pair of children standing between the two of them. One of the children was very clearly a younger Dimitri, both eyes intact, smiling with the same broad, toothy grin that he had now. Felix didn’t recognize the person beside him, a brown-haired girl with a much more restrained smile, but it wasn’t difficult to begin drawing conclusions about their relationship. Siblings, almost certainly.

It also wasn’t difficult to draw conclusions about what Dimitri might have been researching at the library. He looked away. 

A low chirping noise caught his attention instead, and when he glanced back down, the fluffy black cat had risen from its blanket and was stretching out, one limb at a time, its eyes still intent on him. It climbed over the chair Dimitri’s bag rested in and onto the couch where Felix sat, at which point it shifted from a cautious climb into an eager trot. It climbed over the cushions and directly into Felix’s lap, where it settled down, purring softly.

“Get off,” Felix said, not making any effort to remove the cat. It, accordingly, didn’t budge. Felix sighed, sat back, and begrudgingly began to scratch behind the cat’s ears. The cat’s purr deepened as Felix studied the pictures further. There were a pair of frames on the sidetable beside him, and he lifted up one and turned it to take a look.

His father’s face grinned back out at him, and Felix nearly dropped the frame right on top of poor Sascha, who doubtless would not have appreciated it. He managed to control himself, and inspected the picture more closely. Rodrigue was much younger in it — perhaps even close to Felix’s current age, with shorter hair that was somehow much wilder regardless. He didn’t have any facial hair whenever the photo had been taken, which made him look even younger. He sat at a table beside that same broad blond man, who bore a striking resemblance to Dimitri at that age, only the beginnings of a beard at the edges of his chin. They had their arms around one another’s shoulders, the lights of the city behind them. 

“That’s my father.” 

Felix put the picture back down quickly, as Dimitri put a steaming mug on the table before him. He took a seat on the opposite side of the couch, holding a cup of his own. Since he’d vanished into the kitchen, he’d unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves, though his hair was still pulled back in a ponytail. 

“I didn’t mean to intrude,” Felix said. 

“It’s fine,” Dimitri replied, shaking his head. “I see Sascha has made a friend.” 

“I like cats,” Felix replied. He was aware his tone was a bit defensive, but Dimitri just chuckled as he lifted his drink to take a sip. “The other person in the photo …” 

“A friend of my father’s, I assume,” Dimitri said. “I can’t say for certain. I don’t think I’ve ever met the man.”

 _It’s my father._ He didn’t say anything. Hadn’t Dimitri said that his father had known Rodrigue from work? Maybe that was all. Even if they had been younger, clearly at some sort of social gathering …

He put the picture down, rather than think about it further. Then, he let his eyes roam over Dimitri, noting with some annoyance that he’d even undone the top button of his shirt, revealing the hard lines of his collarbone. Felix reached forward to take his drink, and even that movement didn’t budge the cat softly purring in his lap. 

“I think my friends want me to stop looking at all of this,” Felix said, instead of anything about the picture of Rodrigue. Dimitri lowered his cup, his eyebrows climbing as he met Felix’s eyes. “They think I’m not going to find anything. And I think they’re worried that I’m obsessed. Too determined to find something that isn’t there.”

“I remember you saying something about being at odds with them,” Dimitri said. Felix had mentioned Sylvain and Ingrid to him before, albeit not by name. “And, of course, you thinking that perhaps one of them had sent me to stop you, that first time we actually spoke?” 

The flush from earlier returned. Felix shook his head, flustered, trying to chase the rising heat back down his neck. “Yeah, well,” he said. “I was angry and it had been a long day.” Dimitri didn’t respond, taking another drink, and Felix knew that was an indication he should continue. “They’re just looking after me,” he said, lowering his head. The cat had its eyes closed as he continued scratching just under its chin. “I get in stupid fights with them, but they mean well. And —” He closed his eyes, remembering Sylvain telling him to leave the cafe. “And they know something I don’t, about what happened,” he said. “But they can’t, or won’t, tell me anything.” 

“Ah,” Dimitri said, and then, “I know just what you mean. My friend, Dedue, knows more about what happened in the accident than I do, at this point. But he can’t tell me the answers to my questions directly, not with my memory therapy.” 

He opened his eyes again and looked up at Dimitri, who, rather than distressed or upset, looked absolutely calm. His expression was slightly detached, but sympathetic all the same. “Memory therapy?” he said. He vaguely remembered the book Dimitri had dug out, weeks ago. Something about … forgetfulness and formation? _Memory Therapy_ had definitely been in the title.

“Oh,” Dimitri said, and blushed. “I’m sorry. Have you not heard of it? How silly of me to assume. I always, I suppose, think that it’s a much more widespread practice than it really is, these days.” He sighed, and shook his head. “But no, I see it on your face. You’ve got no idea. Have you at least _heard_ of it?”

When Felix scoured his mind, he did remember a mention of something to do with human memory treatment from his psychology credit. He hadn’t paid any closer attention than he needed to pass the class. “Vaguely,” he replied. “It’s a trauma thing, isn’t it? I think mostly I read about it as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder.” 

“Exactly so!” Dimitri leaned forward, setting his mug down on the table between them. He actually had the gall to look excited. “I was in an accident, some years ago,” he explained. “From what I understand, it was intensely traumatic — and certainly, it must have been. I lost my father and my stepmother in the accident. I believe I was lucky to even survive.” 

In the back of Felix’s mind, some sort of hook caught on a thread he barely realized existed. He furrowed his brow, trying to work out the way the puzzle pieces he’d just been handed fit together, but there was some sort of missing segment, a connection he couldn’t quite make. There was something about Dimitri’s story which just didn’t fit quite right in his mind, but he couldn’t understand what — or why. “So they gave you memory therapy,” Felix said. “And now you can’t remember anything about it?” 

“Ideally, the therapy would have been slowly reversed as I got older,” Dimitri replied. He sighed and shrugged, folding his arms. “But sometimes things don’t go the way we plan. The company has long-since folded. And, for that matter, they weren’t supposed to strip my memory of _everything,_ just the accident. I’ve been told I was quite inconsolable over it. But my time in the hospital, my parents’ funerals, even getting the therapy done in the first place.” He waved a hand. “Gone.”0

“That’s ridiculous,” Felix said without any thought. “They fucked up your _therapy?”_

“It’s fine!” Dimitri said with frankly offensive cheer. “I’ve long since come to accept it. But that’s why I’ve been spending my time in the library. I’ve finally grown tired of not knowing the truth about what happened that night, or how my father died, or what about the accident must have been like, to traumatize me so badly. I don’t know if the data on my therapy even still exists, somewhere out there in the world. So I have to take the initiative. Dedue would tell me everything, if he could, but he’s afraid of causing a mental break. It’s certainly possible, and the possibility is enough to scare him off.” His calm expression turned a bit sad, and he picked his cup back up to take a long sip. “He worries about me,” he said. “I think he’s worried I’ll find information I’m not ready to see.” 

The name _Dedue_ was familiar. Hadn’t there been someone in Felix’s high school class with that name?

Unimportant. He dismissed it. “Well, I certainly haven’t had memory therapy,” he said. “And thank god for that. If I lost as much of my memory as you have, I think I’d probably go burn the place down.” 

Dimitri looked at him, and then smiled in a way that made strange strings pull at Felix’s hard. It was the sort of smile that you spent nights thinking about, trying to come up with ways to lance the unhappiness out of it. “Well,” he said, with a voice that said he’d thought about it. “You wouldn’t know, at the time, would you?” 

That turned the heartache into pure sickness. Felix put it out of his mind as well. 

“My brother died in an accident, too,” he said. “Five years ago, almost to the day. I was out of town when it happened. And I don’t — I don’t know a goddamn thing. No one will tell me anything about it. Not my father, not my friends. And every year, I have to go to visit his grave not knowing why he’s even in there.” 

The thread that Dimitri’s story had hooked on thickened, and for a moment, Felix could almost feel the answer within his grasp. 

Dimitri interrupted him, scattering Felix’s thoughts. “For similar reasons to Dedue, I imagine,” he said. “They’re afraid you’ll find something you can’t understand, or that might hurt you?” 

“I’m a grown fucking adult,” Felix replied. “I can decide what will or won’t hurt me.” Below him, Dimitri’s cat was slowly sinking its claws into his leg and then retracting them. He really ought to shoo the thing off his lap. He instead reached forward to pick up his mug. The coffee within was a godsend, right now — steaming hot and black as night. It brought a clarity to Felix’s thoughts. “Besides that,” he said, “I’m not sure that’s the problem. It’s so hard to figure out what any of their problems are. First it’s, ‘oh, you won’t find anything.’ Next thing I know, they’re asking me to leave them alone so they can discuss something that I can’t hear? Right after I’ve been talking about all of this. How I can’t find anything.”

Dimitri studied him for a moment, brow furrowing. “This will sound insensitive, Felix, but — ”

“I don’t want to hear you make excuses for them either,” Felix snapped. 

“No, no, that’s not what I was going to say,” Dimitri said, but he set down his mug again and sat back. His expression went from pensive to relaxed, and it was clear that whatever he’d just been thinking about, he’d decided against bringing it up. “I’m sorry,” he said, instead. “I can’t imagine how frustrating it is. I’m sure they have their reasons, but with it being your brother … surely they could explain themselves to you a bit better.” He made a clicking sound with his teeth, and at once, the cat climbed out of Felix’s lap and trotted over to Dimitri, meowing piteously. Dimitri began scratching it behind its ears. “But let’s put all of that aside, for now,” he said. “Since you’re here, I wanted to thank you for your help. You’ve been indispensable.”

“I’ve been nothing even close to indispensable,” Felix grumbled as he put his own cup down again. Dimitri stopped scratching the cat and, almost immediately, it jumped down and wandered off through the halls, fluffy tail held high in the air. “I think you’re really overstating anything I did to help. I’ve barely even been willing to talk to you, some days.” 

“You speak with me plenty,” Dimitri said. There was such warmth in his voice. “Felix, you may pretend to be distant, but just here and now, you demonstrated such passion. And you’ve been like that all along. You don’t show your colors upfront, but whenever I worry or can’t find my way, you have a new idea. I’ve not found myself sinking into despair since we started working together. Before, any time I found a dead end, it would ruin my momentum. I would have to stop completely for the rest of the day.”

“Dimitri,” Felix said, with a sigh. “Stop it. The flattery is uncalled for.” 

“It’s not flattery,” Dimitri replied, shifting to slide closer to Felix. At once, Felix’s heart began pounding in his chest. It would be a lie to say that he’d never considered this, over their long hours in the library together. Dimitri was an attractive man, once you knew you didn’t need to be afraid of him. And he had a soft, kind personality. Felix had wondered, more than once, if Dimitri had fallen into Toronto headfirst out of one of Ingrid’s romance novels. One of the medieval ones, with vagabond princes who had lost their thrones. Dimitri gave off that air, somehow — an air of complete nobility. But not superiority, or Felix would have chafed at their every meeting. 

No, Dimitri seemed, if anything, to believe that he was somewhere below the rest of the world. Which was frustrating of its own accord. Sometimes, Felix wanted to shake him and tell him to look more after himself and his own interests. 

“I really do like you, Felix,” Dimitri said, his voice low. If Felix had any doubts about the way this conversation had turned, the low rumble of Dimitri’s voice would have settled them at once. It had, in retrospect, been silly to be angry about Dimitri’s accidental flirting. When the man had made up his mind to flirt, it was obvious. “I think you’re sharp as a tack, even if you come off as prickly. I can tell you have a kind heart, under all that armor you’ve built up for yourself. Sometimes you act like you don’t deserve anything I offer you, or that anyone offers you, and it makes my heart ache.”

“Don’t talk about me like that.” 

“That’s exactly what I’m referring to.” Dimitri had, at some point, slid even closer, and now they sat leg-to-leg on the couch. Felix could hardly breathe. He wasn’t entirely convinced that his heart was still beating. “Please. Be kinder to yourself. For me, if for no one else.” Dimitri’s large hand reached up toward the side of Felix’s face, but he paused, hesitated, and drew back again. “I’m sorry. I presume overmuch, I think.” 

“No,” Felix said. The way Dimitri had drawn close to him had pulled the strange tension between them into sharp focus. He was certain that he had met Dimitri, had _known_ Dimitri, but he couldn’t place when, or how, or why. He wanted to know everything about Dimitri. What his life had been like, before they’d met. Had he lost his eye in the same accident that had killed his parents? Who was the sister in his photos that didn’t share his house? Had she also died in the accident? 

Why was Rodrigue in pictures with his father? 

But all the questions fell away. Instead, it was like a thread had been tied between the two of them, and Felix swore that he could almost reach out and touch it, feel the thrum of tension along it like it was a struck piano chord. He wanted nothing more than for Dimitri to reach out and touch him. He wanted, deeply, to forget all the questions he had, to not think about Sylvain and Ingrid huddled over coffee. He wanted to just pretend everything was — normal. Glenn had died in a normal car accident. He and Dimitri had met each other, and become friends, and maybe something more than that. Regardless of what Felix almost-remembered, or the way Dimitri’s face went distant and wistful when Felix made rude remarks about other people. 

“You don’t presume too much,” Felix finally said, an eternity later. Dimitri stared at him, hand still lingering in the air, and Felix reached out and took it. He took a deep breath through his nose, gathered up all the courage he had, and leaned forward to kiss Dimitri. Against his mouth, Dimitri let out a startled noise, before sliding that same hand into Felix’s head, tilting his head slightly for better access to his mouth.

Finally, _thankfully,_ Felix’s whirling mind slowed its frantic thoughts, and he just let him sink into the moment. 

The process of moving themselves to Dimitri’s bedroom was one that, later, Felix didn’t remember much of. He remembered moving apart as the two of them climbed upstairs, but even then, their hands remained touching. Dimitri, somewhere on the way to the stairs, lost his shirt. Underneath it, he was as muscular as Felix had expected, though there were also long white lines of scars over his skin. The line of his adonis belt over the hem of his pants was mesmerizing. Felix found himself almost unable to look away, until Dimitri reached the top of the stairs and Felix, humiliatingly, nearly tripped over the last two. Dimitri caught him, and another second later, they were kissing again. 

Felix had dated a few people since he’d started collage. Every single relationship had only lasted a few dates at most, but almost all of them had involved at least a little making out. He considered himself fairly good at the art, or at least practiced enough that most people wouldn’t know the difference.

Dimitri put him to shame. A moment after they’d started kissing again, Dimitri turned and pushed Felix against a wall, and then pushed his tongue into Felix’s mouth without a second of hesitation. His fingers found Felix’s cheeks, stroked tenderly, and then — only a minute after it had started — Dimitri pulled away, leaving Felix with his chest heaving against the wall. He might have imagined it, but Felix was all but certain he’d seen a small smirk on the other man’s face as he pulled away. This time, Dimitri removed himself entirely instead of letting Felix keep the comfort of his hand. He walked down the hall, sunset light from an overhead skylight forming long lines of gold across his back. His ponytail had also either come loose, or been forcibly pulled out, and his blond hair glistened. 

Felix followed him down the hall. Against one wall hung a _bulletin board, various flyers and a poster for the school dance taking up most of its real estate. He and Dimitri walked by without even glancing_

at it.

He blinked back to himself, feeling like he’d been briefly yanked out of his body and put back into it upside down. Sharply, he turned and stared at the wall behind him. There was something hanging on the wall, there, in between doors, but it was just a landscape painting of mountains overlooking a grassy field. Felix stared, for a long moment, at it, but nothing happened. For that matter, he wasn’t sure what he had expected to happen. For it to shift into — what, a bulletin board? From a high school? 

Why was he thinking about high school?

“Felix?” Dimitri called from somewhere ahead. When Felix turned toward his voice, Dimitri had his head tilted over one shoulder. His eye darted over Felix, and the little Felix could see of the rest of his expression suggested worry.

“I’m fine,” he said, and then, realizing he’d snapped it, “I’m all right. I’m sorry I worried you.”

Dimitri’s expression, or what Felix could see of it, didn’t change. “If you insist,” he said. “But you do know that we don’t have to do this, if

_you don’t want to.” Dimitri’s cheeks were bright pink, and he wouldn’t look Felix in the eye. Which was, frankly, incredible, considering that the two of them were already naked. Both of them had already seen all there was to look at. Felix gestured from himself to Dimitri to indicate that. He opened his mouth to speak, and in the most exasperated tone he could manage, said,_

“I’m just feeling…” He searched for a word, but there wasn’t one for this sensation. “Strange.” 

Again, he felt like he’d briefly been somewhere, and perhaps even some _one_ else, and now the dizziness from that experience swam up around his ears. Dimitri fully turned toward him, and if Felix had doubted the concern on his face before, now it was laid bare. 

“We can stop,” Dimitri said with such heart-aching sincerity that Felix nearly stormed down the hall just to slap him. 

“I don’t want to stop,” he snapped instead. This time, he didn’t bother to apologize, or offer soothing platitudes. “Whatever’s wrong with me, I’ll get over it.” 

Dimitri ducked his head, but Felix had seen a smile before it flickered out of sight. “I wouldn’t want to make your condition worse,” he said. Again, so sincere that Felix’s teeth ached. Whether he’d laughed at Felix’s dismissiveness or not, his concern was real and every ounce of it rankled. It grated at Felix like a conversation he could only hear a third of. 

“Don’t pity me,” he said, and turned fully away from the painting. He strode down the hall and past Dimitri. Without any hesitation, he walked to one of the doors remaining in the hall, and then turned and gestured for Dimitri to hurry up. Dimitri, however, had a frankly dumbfounded look on his face. 

“That’s my room,” he said.

“Yes,” Felix said. “I know. Are you coming, or not?”

“Felix,” Dimitri said, and stepped closer. Now he was doing that same thing he’d done earlier, like Ingrid. Approaching him like a scared animal _at the petting zoo. The animals were always afraid of_

Dimitri looked down at him, steps closer than he had been a few seconds ago. Felix yanked himself back into reality. 

“How did you know which room was mine?” Dimitri asked, voice delicate.

Felix blinked. There had been at least five doors between where Dimitri had stopped and the one Felix had chosen — the last of them, in the corner of the house. When he looked into the room, it was fairly plain and minimalist. Black shelves, blue covers. His favorite color must have been that shade of blue. It _was_ his favorite color. Felix knew it on a level that resonated through his bones.

He’d overreacted in the library. He could admit that to himself, now. His nerves had been shot and he was looking for an excuse to feel like a martyr. 

But this time, he was definitely losing his mind.

“Lucky guess,” he said. If he told Dimitri so much as a word of what was happening to him, Dimitri would never leave him alone. And would _definitely_ refuse to fuck him. Which, Felix reluctantly admitted to himself, was absolutely the correct response to whatever the hell was going on with his head. Had Dimitri fucking dosed him? Had this all been some kind of long con to get Felix into bed and then — 

No. He might have been going insane, but he wasn’t stupid. Dimitri would never. _Could_ never.

 _Why_ was he so sure of it? 

Dimitri, regardless, continued his slow approach, until he stood nearly toe-to-toe with Felix near the doorway. “Are you certain?” he breathed, but Felix felt like he’d never been so certain of anything in his life. Except, maybe he had. It was getting difficult to tell what was real and what was — some kind of twisted echo, ringing through him like the peal of a bell. “Felix, if you’re not feeling well — and I must say, you aren’t exactly _looking_ well — ”

Sick of his dithering, Felix grabbed him by the sides of the face and yanked him down into another kiss. Dimitri let out a sharp, startled grunt and then sank into it, the same way Felix had so many times tonight. And they weren’t even in Dimitri’s fucking room yet. Felix realized that with startling clarity, and shoved Dimitri back, meeting his gaze. Dimitri was flushed deeply, and one glance downward told Felix that he was also hard. 

“I’m tired of waiting,” he said. He turned and stepped into the room. He swore the way the carpet moved under his feet felt familiar. Something was definitely wrong. Had _both_ of them been drugged? Dimitri would never, but could someone else have done it? When? _Why?_

He yanked his shirt off over his head and met Dimitri’s eye _s. He’d already lost his shirt, and he offered Felix a nervous smile. The locker room around them was completely empty. Everyone else had gone home, and it was Felix’s turn with the car. Felix shucked his shorts as Dimitri did the same. Around them, the steam from the other showers began to slowly dissipate. Felix turned away to take off his_ boxers, and heaved in another deep breath as the world spun around him. Which of the two was real? Where _was_ he?

Dimitri’s arms closed around him from behind, and a second later, he bit Felix’s ear. Felix let himself moan, sinking back against the other man’s chest. This was real, he knew, but sometimes those strange fragments seemed too vivid _not_ to be real. There was a poster over the wall, some sort of hockey star that Felix vaguely remembered knowing all about in middle school. Then he blinked, and the poster was gone. Blinked. The generous, king-sized bed was a twin, the rest of the space in the room taken up by desks, bookshelves — blinked. It was just a minimalist room with a bed, dresser, and a set of sidetables. It was the sort of room that belonged to someone who wasn’t willing to spend much money on themselves. 

At once, he made up his mind about how this was about to go. He wrestled his way out of Dimitri’s arms, despite the other man’s vehement protests. He shoved Dimitri toward his bed, and Dimitri stumbled back, more falling onto it than sitting. Felix sank down to his knees, in between Dimitri’s legs, and looked up. Mentally, he dared Dimitri to stop him. 

Dimitri just reached up and slid a hand through Felix’s hair. 

“If you ask me if I’m sure one more time,” Felix said, “I’m getting up and fucking leaving, and you will never see so much as my _shadow_ again.” 

“I somehow feel like that’s a lie,” Dimitri said. His voice was distant. It was almost groggy, as though he was sleeptalking, or perhaps had just woken up from a vivid dream. “Felix?” he asked, and for a moment, Felix saw not a broad-shouldered adult sitting over him, but a teenage boy, perhaps seventeen at most, with a faintly atrocious haircut. He had both eyes, but the shade of blue was the same. “Have you been here before?” Dimitri’s deep voice asked, coming out of the teenager’s mouth.

“I don’t know,” Felix said. “I don’t know how you expect me to answer that.” And, so Dimitri couldn’t try and fish an answer out of him, he leaned down and took Dimitri’s cock into his mouth. Dimitri’s hand, still stroking his hair, clenched into a fist and yanked, and Felix took him even deeper. 

He’d never done this before.

But — he had the distinct sense that he had. More than once. He knew himself, and he’d never had another man’s cock in his mouth, and yet, some fuzzy sensation at the back of his mind sung with familiarity. The same way it had when he’d first seen Dimitri, first spoken to him. It had been on a low simmer since, but now it returned to a rolling boil, and Felix found himself swept away by it. 

He tried not to think too hard about it. He tried, in fact, not to think at all. Any time he tried to think about what he was doing, the best way to do it, his memory threatened to rebel with some other strange echo of something he’d never experienced. So instead, he surrendered to his instincts. He drew his tongue along the vein of Dimitri’s dick, sucked him down deep, then drew off to heave in a hard breath before starting again. It got easier the longer he went, slicking Dimitri up with his own saliva and working muscles he didn’t know he had until now.

He thought.

Don’t think. 

Dimitri’s hands were tight in his hair, pressed into fists right against his scalp. He gripped Felix’s hair so tight that it felt like he was about to rip it out. When Felix paused in his work, he could hear Dimitri’s breaths heaving, moaning on almost every exhale, and now and again saying Felix’s name, or “please,” or “oh, God.” It was, all in all, very gratifying, and Felix found he rather liked the weight of Dimitri in his mouth, pulsing against his tongue. Every now and again, Dimitri’s hips rocked upward almost mindlessly, and Felix rode the thrusts like he was astride a horse.

The petting zoo. 

Don’t _think._

“Felix, oh, my Felix,” Dimitri moaned above him. Felix pulled himself off Dimitri’s cock, breathing hard. An obscene string of saliva hung from his lips, and he wiped it away before Dimitri could see it. Dimitri, however, had his eye closed. Only now did Felix notice that he’d taken off his eyepatch, and he could see the wicked scar curling over Dimitri’s other eyelid. Whatever had taken his eye, it had clearly been traumatic. There was a long, pink line curling up into his hairline. Some of the scar was clean, but some of its edges were ragged. Without thinking, Felix lifted his hand and brushed fingers over Dimitri’s scar.

Dimitri flinched. Immediately, Felix drew away.

“It’s fine,” Dimitri murmured. He still sounded distant, only half-aware. “You only startled me. It’s a reflex, still, to shrug away.” He opened his remaining eye and pulled Felix’s hand back toward him. “You can touch it, if you’re curious. I never meant to hide it from you.” Some sense of clarity returned to his work, and Dimitri frowned, accordingly, as though he was trying to process what was happening. The same way Felix had been.

 _It’s happening to you too,_ Felix could have said, _What’s happening to us? What is this? Who_ are _you?_

“It’s fine.” He yanked his hand away, and repositioned himself. Dimitri’s dick was still throbbing between the two of them, slick with Felix’s spit. “It’s not important, anyway,” he said. He tried to imagine that teenager from the fragmented echoes with only one eye, and something about it made his stomach tie itself into knots. “You can finish in my mouth,” he said, “so don’t bother to ask.” Without another moment of hesitation, he took Dimitri’s dick all the way in. Over him, Dimitri howled like a wild beast. And Felix, thankfully, stopped thinking. 

It became more about rhythm than anything else. Slowly, Felix grew used to the way Dimitri’s hips rocked, until he could somewhat understand when the next thrust was coming. Now, instead of riding above those waves, he drove himself below them, letting Dimitri fuck into his throat with each thrust. Dimitri’s thrusts got harder, deeper, and Felix still insisted on taking every one. He didn’t choke once, and that, he thought, was definitely something to be proud of. Dimitri also got faster, thrusting again and again, less time between each one, until at last he pushed himself as deep as Felix could take him and came. 

Felix would _not_ be able to take pride, later, in swallowing. Instead, he gagged, yanked off Dimitri, and coughed into his hand. He risked a glance upward — Dimitri was sprawled backward, how completely predictable — and snagged a box of tissues off the closest sidetable, choking as he wiped his hand clean. The taste was horrendous. 

“You really don’t have to swallow,” Dimitri mumbled, up on the bed. Again, he sounded more like he was sleeptalking than anything else. “You’ve never been able to, but you must know I’d never hold it against you.” 

The sentence, so casually said, felt like a bucket of cold water dumped over Felix’s head. He shuddered and yanked himself back, looking around the strange room with its empty walls and empty shelves. Every corner he looked in felt wrong, discordant with some deep sensory memory that he knew existed, but couldn’t access. He climbed to his feet and stared down at Dimitri, who was, for his part, fairly insensate. For a split second, the teenager was there again, and then they both were, taking up the same space, and the effort to understand what was happening sent a bolt of terror through him. It was almost tangible, and the instant it hit him, Felix felt bile rising in his throat.

“I — have to go,” he said. 

“What?” Dimitri sat up. He blinked blearily. His gleaming golden hair was tangled and damp with sweat, and Felix wanted, very deeply, to stay there and tangle it some more. But this room felt wrong, bone-deep _wrong,_ and there was only so much he could do to keep his mind clear when there seemed to be quite a bit of it completely out of his control. None of his wandering thoughts had led him anywhere good, since they’d started this little dalliance. Only to the echoes and fragments, which he didn’t understand. He wasn’t sure he could.

But he was certain more of them would come if he stayed in this room any longer. And, as if to confirm that, sick vertigo rolled in a thundering surge up his throat, and the floor below him began to sway.

“I have to go,” he repeated, and yanked his pants on. His own arousal had firmly abated by now, but he still turned away from Dimitri, if only so he wouldn’t have to see his face as he pulled his things back on and left. “I’m sorry. It’s not anything you did. I — really don’t feel well.” In fact, he felt worse by the moment. His stomach was starting to roil. He was sweating, shivering. It was as though his very body protested staying here any longer. 

“Felix, I’m sorry.” The mattress squeaked, and Felix picked up the pace, frantically buttoning his shirt before giving up halfway through and yanking a sock on so quickly that it went on backwards. “I thought —”

“I just fucking said it’s not anything you did!” Felix snapped. He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves. He didn’t dare to glance back at Dimitri, but it was easy enough to guess what his expression must have been. He meant well. Perhaps he meant a bit _too_ well. Hie doubtless thought he had gone too far, that perhaps Felix had changed his mind. “I just —” He had to get out of this fucking room. He felt like the edges, the shadows in the corners of the room, were doubling on themselves. Deepening, lightening, echoing themselves like he’d taken a blow to the head. 

“At least let me give you a ride.” 

Felix couldn’t answer. It would take too much effort, and he was all but certain that if he opened his mouth, he would vomit. So, instead, he staggered halfway out of the room and sank down to his knees, trying to breathe. The hallway echoed, briefly, the same way that Dimitri’s room had, but then it faded. The dizziness rolling through his mind in thick, dark waves at last began to settle.

“Felix?”

Now Dimitri sounded alarmed. Felix tried to pull himself to his feet, but he felt, now, like all the puppet strings of his body had been cut. His limbs didn’t respond to him, or if they did, it hurt to move them. His heart was still racing, even though he at least no longer felt like he was trapped in a carnival ride. His breaths heaved out in pants. The air, too hot a moment ago, now felt freezing against his skin. A moment after he noted that, Dimirti was beside him, still completely naked. He hadn’t even put his eyepatch back on. He hadn’t even put his underthings back on. 

“I knew this was a bad idea,” Dimitri said mournfully. “Here. Let me help you to the bed.”

“No!” Felix barked. He more sensed than saw Dimitri freeze, hands up like he was trying to prove that he wasn’t a threat. “I’m fine,” he said. “I just — need to sit down.” 

“The couch, then,” Dimitri said. “In the main room. I don’t think you could handle stairs by yourself.”

Felix snorted. “Are you going to escort me into your main room completely naked?” he asked, his tone sardonic despite the way his muscles still felt like they’d all been turned to jelly. There was a moment of pure silence, and then Dimitri was the one to snort. The snort turned into loud, heavy peals of laughter, and something deep in Felix’s guts seized with more recognition. He curled further in on himself. At once, Dimitri’s laughter died and he looped one arm around Felix, helping him to his feet.

He helped Felix into one of the other bedrooms, plainly made up as a guest room of sorts. It was obvious that Dimitri had at least one friend who stayed over consistently — there were a few personal effects, scarves and shirts, in the room as though they’d been accidentally left behind after staying the night. It gave Felix a sick and entirely unearned sense of relief that, whoever it was (that Dedue person, perhaps?), they slept in a separate room from Dimitri. The bed here was much smaller, and while Felix supposed that didn’t prove Dimitri didn’t, occasionally, sleep with Dedue (it _had_ to be Dedue), he knew that it was unlikely. 

The jealousy was stupid, and he knew it. He took a moment to collect himself, still half-dressed, as over him a completely undressed Dimitri fretted like a mother hen. 

“Calm down,” he said. His breaths had finally evened back out, and now he could even feel his pulse slowing a bit. “I’m fine. I must just be — I don’t know. Dehydrated. Tired.” It was difficult, now that it was over, not to dismiss the entire thing as just another panic attack, but he’d had plenty of those over the years. It wasn’t a panic attack. 

“Let me get dressed,” Dimitri said, urgently, as though he didn’t speak quickly a bomb would go off, “and then I’ll give you a ride home. You said you took the train today, didn’t you? So you don’t need to drive. We’ll get you home, and you can rest. I knew we should have stopped.”

“I’m _fine,_ ” Felix repeated, even if he knew he wouldn’t be listened to. 

“If you say so,” Dimitri replied, sounding unconvinced. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” And then he was gone. Felix let himself lay back on the bed, head still spinning slightly. There was no strange echo in this room, no sense of recognition from — what, another lifetime? And, thankfully, no nausea. Still, the sense of familiarity lingered at the back of his mind, whether it was actively distressing him or not. He had to know Dimitri. But he couldn’t fathom where from, or why he didn’t fucking _know._

He closed his eyes. 

Why was Rodrigue in that picture with Dimitri’s father? He must have been twenty years younger. Maybe in college, himself, at the time. But that implied a deeper relationship than just a pair of people who knew one another from work, didn’t it? 

Time drifted by without much measure to it, but eventually, someone in the doorway cleared their throat. Felix sat up and inspected Dimitri, who now wore a different shirt and a pair of blue jeans so tight that Felix swore they had to be a size too small. 

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Dimitri said apologetically. “You’re welcome to sleep here, if you’d rather.” 

He would rather. He would rather sleep in Dimitri’s room, spend the rest of the night enjoying himself and forgetting how to think, if he didn’t know it would drive him right back to the shaking, near-retching mess he’d been only a few minutes ago. 

“I can’t,” he said. “I need to go home. I have an appointment in the morning, and my father is going to wonder where I am.” 

“Of course,” Dimitri said, smoothly. He’d been expecting that answer. Maybe, going off how he’d been acting earlier, he was afraid of Felix staying here as well. Maybe his own strange fragments were getting the best of him. Or maybe Felix was just that unpleasant of company. (But yet again, yet _again_ Felix knew that Dimitri would never dream of such negative feelings. This was getting irritating.) But, for both their sakes, Felix rose to his feet without asking. 

He was relieved to find that he could manage the stairs by himself after all, both leaving Dimitri’s house and climbing back up the steps to his own, a half hour later. He risked one last glance back at Dimitri before he went inside, but Dimitri was looking squarely beyond him, at the house itself, a perplexed expression on his face.

 _Who are we?_ Felix wondered, and almost asked.

Instead, he stepped inside, and closed the door behind him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Be sure to check out [the art by buaylomatcha](https://twitter.com/bualoymatcha/status/1325171097650696194) and [the art by chusyds!](https://twitter.com/chusyds/status/1325168134886658048)


End file.
